The regulatory environment is a bear. Small firms are struggling to keep up with the burden, and there is a growing sense of resentment among owners of firms that the regulatory burden has become over-burdensome and unmanageable. So I was startled to see a story in a major financial services trade which took the angle of saying in essence ‘yes, the regulatory burden is difficult, but owners of firms have made their own beds by not policing the regulators, and allowing this new draconian environment to develop.’ (!). I nearly fell out of my chair. (more…)

Ben Katz doesn’t always sleep well. Vice-president of a Hauppauge, N.Y. brokerage firm, Zeus Securities, Katz is charged with keeping the firm’s technology systems safe from hackers and thieves. “Everyone (in the financial industry) has to worry about being a target” of data theft, says Katz. He says the concerns keep him up at night. “If someone wants to make you a target, they will, and they will sabotage you.” (more…)

In a marketplace of piecemeal remedies, many vendors are happy to sell a small part of the compliance solution, leaving the difficult task of integration to your IT department. However, these integration costs can double your bottom line, resulting in out-of-control expenditures. It is easy to overlook the additional costs associated with archiving software.

Being educated about hidden costs allows you to make an informed decision based on the total system cost — not just what’s on an invoice. Presented here are some of the things to look for when purchasing an email archiving system: (more…)

Getting a new computer could be a very risky business. Not because of the price. Not because of any death ray emitted from the screen. And not because of a virus that will eat your files while emailing your contacts. It will be because you will take your old machine and do one of several things: Put it in the nearest empty cubicle, give it to your nephew, auction it on eBay, or perhaps just throw it out the window like you may have dreamed of doing on many occasions. (more…)

Since the very beginning of financial time, since the very concept of shares trading bubbled up in the inspired minds of would-be traders and investors, there has been, somewhere within arm’s reach of that inspired mind, a hot cup of caffeine. History doesn’t seem to care whether that caffeine is tea or coffee or some other incantation of the stuff; the important lesson seems to be simply that it was there, in a cup, within reach. Yet while we take our Darjeeling and espresso quite for granted, it is well to remember that these products arrived on the European scene rather recently, compared with other equally popular brewed beverages. Yet for all the hops or grapes in the western world, one is hard put to place, with any precision, any single event whereby the hops or grape brews were integral to any revolution in the world’s financial markets. (more…)

Solid investment performance isn’t always enough. In fact, clients consider their relationship with financial professionals to be four times more important than investment performance when gauging overall satisfaction, according to research conducted by Russ Alan Prince, a leading authority on affluent investors.

That’s where “personal relationship cultivation” comes in. It’s the practice of building and maintaining personal bonds with long-term clients.
And practicing it well can pay off well for everyone involved. (more…)

September marked the four-year anniversary of the terrible and traumatic events of 9/11. And so, we felt it was appropriate to take a look back at the effect that this had on the market and upon employment within our industry. Perhaps we can shed some light on the interaction between the stock market as reflected by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and employment within the Securities Industry (SI). (more…)

Weeding through dozens of broker/dealer marketing kits as I do every year, and listening to advisors sounding off about them on a daily basis, I have concluded that more often than not, there is much room for improvement.
Some firms’ marketing kits are two-to-three-inch-thick doorstops, bogged down with mind-numbing amounts of information—plus a lot of generic claims that say little. Broker/dealers routinely advertise that they provide representatives with “flexibility,” “great service,” and “the latest in high technology,” when, in truth, they don’t always live up to these claims. (more…)

Increased productivity in your Registered Represent-atives, that is, getting them to perform from 20 percent to 30 percent of capacity to performing nearer 80 percent to 90 percent of capacity is the goal of most managers.

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Financial profiling and account penetration has worked so well for many financial advisors that once advisors become comfortable with it — following the approach outlined — they will be able to use it to help their clients discover additional assets.

Industry studies have repeatedly demonstrated that financial advisors usually manage substantially less than 40 percent of their clients’ assets. (They only think they’re managing more.) Affluent investors indicate that they have, on average, four investment advisors they utilize. Yet, it is quite reasonable to expect to manage 70 to 80 percent of a client’s assets. Unfortunately, until now, the difficulty has been discovering them. (more…)