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Articles published 4/2015


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Jeff Schnitz (r.) sits shoulder to shoulder with Joe Piazza to tell prospects why Addepar is part of their hyper-ambitious RIA startup plan.

The wary love affair between RIAs and Addepar and where it's headed

Apr 30, 2015

Silicon Valley Bank launches RIA, SVB Private Bank, to join Robertson Stephens and Iconiq Capital among Bay Area RIA devotees


Nevin Freeman: The killer feature of the new version of Addepar is the report generation. It’s unbelievably simple to use for what it produces.

Review: Nevin Freeman pops the Addepar hood to see what $50 million of coding can do for RIA software

Apr 29, 2015

Other than a couple of willful eccentricities, the Mountain View-based start-up's engineers earn a 'well done' from our technology maven


Rob Isbitts: That money should have a target on its back, and we RIAs as an industry should be managing it.

Chasing bad performance: Why investors can't get enough of those increasingly lame hedge funds

Apr 28, 2015

Most assets are institutional but there's a trillion dollars of baby boomer assets ripe for the plucking by RIAs who can generate returns sans the highway robbery fees


Voya will spend $300 million to $350 million over three to four years on behalf of the entire firm and retirement will get a portion of that money

After a six-month pause, Voya fills the Maliz Beams void with a 401(k) ace whose advancement stalled

Apr 28, 2015

Charlie Nelson was passed over twice at Great-West but has now landed a giant opportunity


Peter Mangan: If you don't become asset custodians, we won't become investment advisors.

Peter Mangan taunts rival RIA custodians as Shareholder Services Group adds weapons, advisors

Apr 27, 2015

San Diego event celebrates emerging advisors and their emerging custodian


Walt Bettinger: As time goes on, the weighting of new-to-firm clients is growing.

Schwab grabs astounding $1.5 billion of robo assets in six weeks, but mostly from itself

Apr 24, 2015

Walt Bettinger boasts of 'hundreds of new accounts daily' for Schwab Intelligent Portfolios then fences with Wall Street analysts who beg details


Thomas Peterffy: The acquisition of Covestor is a positive development toward making Interactive Brokers the premier global platform for investors, advisors, hedge funds and money managers to find each other.

Covestor becomes latest robo site to sell out and become a bauble on bigger chain

Apr 24, 2015

Interactive brokers buys the New York-based SMA-robo that has struggled to gain assets


Peter Mafteiu: This is like overwhelming a reader ... so they really cannot map out the changes that might affect a particular customer.

Schwab will take a machete to Schwab Private Client hyper-fee fund holdings but still steer assets to high-margin OneSource, ADV says

Apr 24, 2015

The cost-slashing by the $65-billion AUM San Francisco RIA is meant to streamline and improve process, according to the company


Eric Poirer [r.] with Joe Lonsdale: There are 10 or 20 custodians just for a mid-sized RIA. It's just a giant mess.

Addepar lays out world-fixing vision and rolls out upgrades at swanky The Battery event in San Francisco

Apr 23, 2015

RIAs got the '$120-trillion' pitch straight from Joe Lonsdale and Eric Poirer, who say they are unveiling new software that will speak the same language to the Tower of Babel that is the RIA industry


Eric Clarke [far l.] listens raptly as Simon Roy [far r.] touts Jemstep, then inks a deal with him over cocktails. Also pictured: Trizic founder Brad Matthews and Upside user, 'Downtown' Josh Brown

Orion and Jemstep form first big marriage of non-robo and robo software -- at advisor behest -- to create RIA e-commerce

Apr 22, 2015

The Nebraska-based conventional provider and the Silicon Valley whiz-bang, with Salesforce and TD Ameritrade as common bonds, found it easy to partner with each other


Bill Crager: Financial planning creeps closer to us. We'd like to build or be strategic.

How it is that the new, new thing in financial advice is an old, old thing retreaded and vastly improved

Apr 21, 2015

Financial planning software is hot everywhere you look, from the M&A market to the robo pipelines, driven by a reframing of its very reason to exist


Marcia Wagner: I don't want obnoxious crap like that in my contract.

Why exactly DOL's latest action is so shocking to so many brokers -- and even ERISA lawyers -- despite years of warnings

Apr 20, 2015

Brokers managing IRA assets never imagined they'd need to make a written promise to do right by investors


Rudy Adolf: There is no equivalent proposition to Focus available in Canada.

Roll-ups are off at an acquisition clip in 2015 as $2 billion washes over the transom in a single week

Apr 17, 2015

Focus follows Dynasty into Canada as the three big aggregators toggle between organic and inorganic growth


Joe Duran: We think this is the closest example to what Dimensional Fund Advisors does.

United Capital chases DFA's MO, trains '1099 advisors' and co-opts Starbucks brand guy

Apr 16, 2015

The multitasking Newport Beach-based national RIA also announced closing on two more RIA purchases with about $625 million of AUM


Mark Casady has a new beard but his firm's views on fiduciary rules may differ from FSI by more than a whisker.

LPL reconsiders FSI as it drops out of its board, offers own DOL stand and hires own lobbyist

Apr 16, 2015

The giant IBD-custodian breaks from Financial Services Institute pack with pro-DOL statement as FSI posts more negative view on Labor Dept.'s 'fiduciary' definition


Matthew McGinness: A lot of advisors have grown rusty in engaging clients.

Envestnet gets Matt McGinness as it launches an advisor consulting division

Apr 15, 2015

The problem for the Chicago outsourcer is that its insourcers are stung by 2008 and operating in suboptimal fashion


Martha Post: People who had knee-jerk reactions and exited the fund last year out of panic or fear missed out.

PIMCO is 'probably healthier' without Bill Gross and the outflow bloodbath is likely near its end, Morningstar says

Apr 14, 2015

Using a management-by-triumvirate approach, the Newport Beach bomber is killing its peers despite floods of outflows and unflinching RIAs are saying their version of 'I told you so'


Jeff Zients: For some special interests and their allies in Congress, the only good rule would be no rule at all. We want to make very clear that inaction is not an acceptable outcome of this process.

Jeff Zients and Tom Perez come out swinging for a new fiduciary era

Apr 14, 2015

The Obama administration is taking no guff from Wall Street this time


Charles Goldman carries on the kind of side conversation that makes the Tiburon CEO Summit wheels spin.

Top RIA takeaways from my trip to New York City and my stop-by at the Tiburon CEO Summit

Apr 13, 2015

My trip spanned Midtown (Envestnet), the Flatiron District (Betterment) and Wall Street (periphery of the Tiburon CEO Summit)


William Hamm Jr.: I spent close to $100,000 and we had two auditing firms come in together to go over our compliance and procedures and we got a clean bill of health.

How Bill Hamm is turning a $10 billion-plus loss of 401(k) assets into a revenue-neutral, neural-neutral experience

Apr 10, 2015

After cleaning up his compliance act with an LPL assist, the head of Independent Financial Partners is fighting back


David Canter and Marty Bicknell have expanded a growing partnership between the Boston and Leawood, Kan. firms.

Marty Bicknell and Fidelity enter into the mother of all cross-RIA referral deals

Apr 9, 2015

What the Mariner CEO promises the Boston giant is that the 'S' word -- segmentation -- will only apply to advisors, not clients


Mike Foy: We were wondering if hiring more women is a good strategy for making women investors happy and we found out it isn't.

In tight race, Fidelity and Edward Jones tie for top honors in J.D. Power survey as spiky markets drive down satisfaction scores across the board

Apr 9, 2015

In a first, J.D. Power asked women the importance of a same-sex advisor -- and got a surprising response


Jon Stein: It's basically a nonevent. I don't think they're going after the same customers.

Schwab's robo launch stimulates sign-ups at Betterment and Wealthfront -- and itself

Apr 8, 2015

Schwab Intelligent Portfolios' wake is lifting the fortunes of independent robos, say CEOs gathered in Manhattan for the Tiburon CEO Summit


Sara Botkin [with father Les and brother Lester]: We learned that it became a fireable offense to refer clients to other banks.

This father-daughter-son team survived 9/11 but divorced Wall Street altogether 14 years later

Apr 7, 2015

The trigger was a demand by Morgan Stanley to sign a bank contract but there was much more that led the practice to LPL OSJ, Private Advisor Group


Troy Hammond: If we sold our enterprise to CAPTRUST, I think it would have felt weird to our advisors.

As $160-billion CAPTRUST makes a snack of $10-billion Pensionmark, Fielding Miller accelerates his roll-up plans with a liberal structure

Apr 6, 2015

The Raleigh, N.C.-based firm's willingness to buy 49% reduces 'weird' and may set the stage for life as more of a 401(k) franchisor


Tim Schaefer: There are actionable 'to-dos' for the clients. The client can make progress on the plan.

The real reasons Northwestern Mutual paid a reported $250 million for LearnVest

Apr 1, 2015

With $2.7 billion in cash to burn after the Russell Investments spin-off, the Milwaukee-based company was simply an old-line insurer with desktop software in search of a planning pedigree



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