By Bob Veres
Source: Advisor Perspectives

I recently served as a facilitator for the annual NexGen conference, this year held on the campus of Augustana University in Moline, IL. This gave me a terrific opportunity to reacquaint myself with the luxurious living conditions of a campus dormitory. More importantly, I was able to gain insight into the very different way that the financial planning landscape looks through the eyes of younger advisors just starting their careers — and in many cases, from the bottom end of a planning firm’s organizational chart.

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Posted by Michael Kitces
Source: Nerd’s Eye View blog

As so-called “robo-advisors” continue to grow, offering their services to more and more consumers at a modest 0.15% – 0.35% cost, the question arises whether such services will ultimately be a threat to traditional advisors. Can human advisors survive in a world where robo-advisors commoditize the cost of passive strategic portfolio construction down to almost nothing? What can today’s advisors do to fend off the threat?

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By Glenn G. Kautt
Source: Financial Planning

In the advisory industry, innovation produces above-average growth as firms employ technology more efficiently, use staff more effectively and provide better services for clients. Innovation and growth come at a cost, however. How do you know if an innovative idea will work in the first place?
If you’ve put something into effect and it’s not working the way you expected, what do you do about it?

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By Helen Modly, CFP, ChFC
Source: Morningstar Advisor

A portfolio management system that seamlessly connects to a rebalancing program that you access through your CRM after your daily downloads and reconciliation have been done for you. Too good to be true? Not if you are willing to invest the time, money, and effort to create true scalability in your firm.

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By Bob Veres
Source: Financial Planning

The financial planning profession, once again, is at an inflection point — and the winners of the last revolution may end up the losers when this one runs its course. A new revenue model has emerged that is more closely aligned with the interests of the client. It also happens to open up a financial advisor’s service to a much broader ocean of younger and less wealthy clients. You should probably be paying attention.

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By Janet Levaux
Source: ThinkAdvisor

Mark Tibergien says there’s a fairly straightforward way for financial advisors to both improve their business and that of the broader industry, while getting more Americans to improve their financial health: Boost financial literacy.

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By Michael Kitces
Source: Nerd’s Eye View blog

As an advisory business gets started, the focal point is typically on just getting the first few paying clients in the door – the key aspect being paying clients. Simply put, it’s all about just trying to generate some revenue, and the key indicator for measuring the advisory firm is pretty straightforward: how much revenue is there.

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By Melanie Waddell
Source: ThinkAdvisor

Just as advisors’ use of exchange-traded funds continues to rise, advisors are shying away from annuities, according to the Financial Planning Association’s 2014 Trends and Investing survey.

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By David Rossien
Source: Financial Advisor

The dirty little secret of financial account aggregation is that, even after over a decade of effort, no aggregator has truly “cracked the code” and made the consolidation of investor accounts a 100 percent seamless operation.

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By Liz Skinner
Source: InvestmentNews

Resigned to the fact that so-called “robo-advisers” are here to stay, many advisory firm executives are considering ways to partner with these firms or to incorporate the digital advice model into their own offerings. About 31% of registered investment adviser and broker-dealer executives polled in an informal Fidelity Institutional survey earlier this month said they plan to look for ways to partner with a digital adviser. A quarter of the executives said they might incorporate an online model into their existing business, according to the poll released Thursday.

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