2010 Major Firms Symposium Highlights

The sixth annual Major Firms Symposium was held October 8-9, 2010 in Denver, CO. About 80 industry executives participated in this event. Highlights from this event are below.

Click to go to a specific session:
FPA Executive Committee
Doug Lennick - Behavioral Finance
Technology Panel
Don Trone - Harmonizing the Fiduciary Standard
Practice Management Panel
Defining Financial Planning Whitepaper Discussion

FPA Executive Committee:

Marv Tuttle, Executive Director
Richard Salmen, Chair
Tom Potts, President
Marty Kurtz, President-elect

Highlights include:
• Branding campaign to grow membership
• Diversity initiative to bring in more ethnic groups, women
• Financial Planning Days with council of mayors to promote financial planning with consumers
• Recent promotion of new managing director for business development and industry relations - Jaleen Edwards
• Looking for more involvement from the major firms on committees, Board of Directors, etc.

Doug Lennick - Behavioral Finance

Doug Lennick reviewed how we got to where we are today. He notes that Wall Street died two years ago when it became more about them than their customers and the industry finally melted down. All decisions are emotional which is why investors are in bonds now - they are scared. Investors don't trust Wall Street or advisers because of the financial crisis and the product failures. In order to rectify, advisers need to have a greater understanding of where the investor is coming from, including development of "soft skills". To download the presentation click here.

Technology Panel

Andre Guillemin - AT&T / Pyxis Mobile
Kelly Brown, EISI
Jennifer Valdez, SunGard
Purna Pareek, Fiserv
Oleg Tishkevich, Finance Logix

Highlights include:
• Wide ranging discussion on trends
• Retirement income planning - how to enable intelligence in decisions, active area for development
• All firms looking to bring output to iPad and tablets - up to the firms to roll it out, they are ready
• Integration is a hot topic, all firms claim they can integrate and are building platforms for integration with CRM
• Security and confidentiality of client data is increasingly important

Don Trone - Harmonizing the Fiduciary Standard

As the industry prepares for the fiduciary standard, Don Trone of Strategic Ethos presented on how broker dealers, wirehouses and insurance companies can establish an operational approach to implement a harmonized fiduciary standard. He noted that not all advisers can or should be fiduciaries but those who will fall under the standard can start to prepare now. Click here to download the presentation.

Practice Management Panel

Andre Guillemin, AT & T, Pyxis Mobile
David Canter, Fidelity
Stephanie Bogan, Quantuvis Consulting

Andre Guillemin - AT&T, review of mobile smart phone landscape
• 80% of companies are enabling mobile devices for their employees.
• Mobile can help increase the adoption of CRM (average adoption rate is 33 percent) because it makes the data collection process easier.
• Consumers can provide the data using tablets or other mobile technologies to make the process easier for advisers and interactive for consumers.

David Canter - Fidelity IWS
• David manages a team of consultants that can help all organizations.
• The consultants work with People, Process, & Technology to help execute effective solutions.
• Systems integration and staff training are key to producing business benefits from a practice management standpoint.

Stephanie Bogan, Quantuvis Consulting
• Your overall business strategy drives outcomes.
• By taking a bottom up approach and working with advisers, you can help your advisers become more successful and increase overall business success as a result.
• Stephanie demonstrated Quantuvis Online - series of adviser dashboards that show productivity, progress, profitability, etc., which enable advisers to make more effective decisions.

Defining Financial Planning Whitepaper Discussion

This continuation of interactive discussions and work done last year at FPA Anaheim in 2009 and in March 2010 in New York City regional meeting is designed to have all of the major firms agree on the definition of financial planning to assist regulators in defining financial planning, rather relying on regulators to make the decision.

Highlights include:

Very close to a definition on:
- Scope - Can be just one area of planning, so a retirement module is considered planning
- Process - at least the first four steps must be done, implementation and monitoring not part of base line service
- Deliverable - best practice for being in writing, but verbal is also included
- Integration - advice should take into consideration other areas
The final whitepaper will be going for FPA Board review in November.