Sunset of support for Advent Axys 3.5.1 and 3.6

If you are a current user of Axys 3.5.1 or 3.6, please be aware that Advent software recently announced the sunset of support for these versions of their Axys software. Any firm using these versions of the Axys software will not receive support after December 31, 2010. Since the release of 3.6, there have been two additional releases, Axys 3.7 and Axys 3.8. Axys 3.8 is the only version that Advent offers that will support the new option symbols as part of the options symbology initiative. Both versions offer a number of upgrades from the previous versions and are of no charge to upgrade for firms using the Advent Axys software. Upgrades are very seamless and can be done with no interruption in your business day.

Make Life Easier With Portfolio Management Software (Part 2)

Yesterday's blog post talked about how some of the most valued experts in our industry - financial advisors and planners - can get bogged down by all of the tasks they try to fit into each day and all of the information they have to manage. We suggested that managing their clients' investment data, an important part of their responsibilities, can be difficult and time-consuming but doesn't have to be!

So how can you make sure that your portfolio management software, such as Axys® or Advent Portfolio Exchange® (APX), is living up to its potential to free up your time and add substantial value to your organization?

Ultimately, it comes down to knowing what the software can do, and then getting it to do it. If you aren't sure about your proficiency on one or both counts, help is available. You just need access to someone that understands your needs, is an expert in the software you're using, and can effectively solve your problems and find opportunities for improvement you didn't know existed. Here are some options:

Call your software company's technical support

• Free!
• You can generally get helpful answers to targeted questions (i.e., "can I add a column to this report?).
• The ultimate answer might not be free (i.e., "we would be happy to build that report for you!").

While helpful for one-off questions, these associates may not have the time or training to help improve your overall operations. If you're not sure what your problem is or what the possibilities are, you might not get much bang for your buck from this solution.

Engage a consultant

• You have an expert on call that understands your business, knows the software, has probably "seen it all before," and has an incentive to provide a lot of value for your dollar; like all good businesspeople, consultants value repeat customers and referrals.
• Works best if you are happy with your existing human resources but think your data and/or processes could use some tweaks, significant enhancements, or even a large overhaul.
• This option isn't free (what expert is?), and they can't do it all for you; both you and they have to understand their role and know their limits.

There's wisdom in "you get what you pay for," and a good consultant makes sure you get much more than you pay for; expert consulting can continue to pay dividends long after the consultant's work is done.

Hire a full-time employee

• You have an in-house expert that understands your business and can help your operations department shine.
• Makes sense when you have the budget and enough work for a full-time portfolio management software expert.
• More expensive

So what option is best for you? Well, only you can answer that... or at least, only you can decide which options to explore.

• Have some specific questions? It will only cost you a few minutes of your time to see if your software's tech support desk can help.
  
• If you're not sure what you need, or not even sure what's possible, a consultant may be your best bet. A good consultant will offer a free initial consultation to talk to you about your business, your challenges, and whether that consultant is qualified to help.
  
• If you have the budget and enough work, hire an expert! If you're not sure how to determine who's really "an expert," find a reliable contact that can help you check out your potential hires' proficiencies; another expert at a peer advisory company, a trusted industry partner, or a consultant that deals with the software in question may all be good resources.

One size never fits all, and the time you invest in selecting the best support for your office will pay for itself many times over. 

 

We welcome the opportunity to help. Tandem's consultants are experienced, expert industry professionals that have encountered and resolved a wide range of challenges, and helped realize opportunities for dramatic increases in productivity and profitability for users of Advent's Axys® and Advent Portfolio Exchange® (APX). Feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to recommend the best options for your unique organization and situation.

Make Life Easier With Portfolio Management Software (Part 1)

A recent survey for Advent Software confirmed what our experiences tell us every day - investment advisors, financial planners, and their support personnel are overwhelmed! Among the main challenges noted by survey respondents were:

• Finding enough time to get things done
• Collecting, organizing, and using information

Sound familiar?

It's easy to see how these two challenges feed into each other. The less you know about how to manage your information, the less efficient and productive you will be. The more time you spend dealing with that information, the less time you'll have for other important tasks.

Many offices have installed software to manage information that would otherwise be overwhelming. And, competing for the top of the "most overwhelming" category is investment management data; the data handled by portfolio management software like Axys® and Advent Portfolio Exchange® (APX).

As a result of uncertainty about how to best organize, find, use, and present their investment data with their portfolio management software, many offices find themselves spending too much time on these tasks rather than on tasks that add the most value to their business like doing investment research, meeting with current clients, and finding new clients. This is understandable - with the complexity of many software packages, not everyone can be an expert.

We frequently compare Axys and APX with a tool more familiar to businesses of all kinds - Microsoft's Excel®. Excel can organize data, do complex computations, create graphs and charts, and perform myriad other functions, but you have to know what it can do and how to do it. In less experienced hands, Excel becomes a simplistic spreadsheet program. That's fine if that's all you need, but what if it could automate many of your time-consuming tasks, help you make better decisions, and be an invaluable part of how you service and impress your customers? How can you get all of these benefits from what originally seemed to be just a nice way to organize numbers into grids?

Portfolio management software packages, like Axys and APX, can be just like Excel. They have amazing capabilities built right in, but you can only take advantage of their sophistication if you know what they can do. But then, when you learn what they can do, how can you get them to help make your life easier without months or years of training, trial and error, and a few too many headaches? We have seen many approaches...

• Some offices hire a full-time expert to make their software "sing," and the expert does just that - they understand the software and the business, and they help both perform just the way they're supposed to.
  
• Other companies have someone on staff that they consider to be their expert, but often this individual isn't optimally qualified to help turn management's "wish list" into reality. This associate has a narrow range of well-developed proficiencies, but the firm's management eventually starts wondering... "Didn't the sales rep say the software could do so much more?"
  
• In some cases, the principal advisors and planners are running the software themselves, at least for many important tasks, and are amazed to hear (for example) that they don't have to print out several, dozens, or even of reports one by one. If we just had a nickel for every time we heard "why didn't I know it could do that?"...

So, short of hiring your very own full-time expert, how can you get your software to sing? That's the topic of tomorrow's blog post.

 

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As always, Tandem welcomes your inquiries - feel free to contact us with your questions.

Achieving a whole financial picture in Axys and APX

Comprehensive financial advice often begins with a whole picture view of a client's assets.  Frequently this can include assets that are "held-away" from an advisor's management. "Held-away" assets can be varied and may consist of other managed accounts, retirement accounts, alternative investments, and bank accounts.  In order to compile and update data that is not available through Advent's Custodial Data (ACD) platform, advisors often rely on a manual process by which accounts are updated on an advisor's network by use of a client statement, online account access, or by information that may be passed along by a client to an advisor. This process is often times tedious, time-consuming, error-prone, and costly to the advisor. As a result, many firms are unwilling or unable to track all client assets on their portfolio management systems.

With the recent advances in account aggregation software, firms are now finding that a complete financial picture is easier to achieve than they originally thought. Advisors that have permission or access to their clients' website logins can enroll in account aggregation services that will allow for a data import into their Advent Axys and APX portfolio management system. Through the use of screen-scraping or data feed technology, aggregation services extract transactions, positions, and prices from the clients' financial services websites for import into an advisor's Axys or APX software. Some of the most popular Advent compatible service providers of this technology are ByAllAccounts, Cash Edge, and Advisor Exchange.

As with the ACD data download, a routine data check of position reconciliations and investment data are essential in order to ensure optimal data quality, but the potential time and money savings for advisors is significant. In addition to these savings, a complete view of client data allows offices to regularly analyze, leverage, and make the best decisions for their clients' financial situations.  A cost-benefit analysis for your office is important to determine if this type of service is appropriate for you. Tandem Business Specialists can assist you with your aggregation needs analysis, setup, and deployment.  Contact us for a free consultation.

Optimize your reporting in Axys and APX

The system capabilities of your Axys or APX software reporting can often be perceived as limited when your office runs routine tasks or generates routine reports. We often hear advisors voice their desire for robust reports for in-house analytics, quarterly reporting, and compliance only to feel limited with their current Advent product. Often times, operational staff may lack the time, experience and product knowledge to test the system limitations of the product and produce the desired options that advisors seek. For such a large investment, your portfolio management product should and can produce the reports that you need to run your firm optimally.

Reporting for data analysis and compliance can easily be derived from the use of canned reports or through the use of Advent's custom report writing feature.  With the proper experience and education, a customized report can be produced using the information that is available in Axys or APX. Sometimes it's not even as complicated as building a new report; you may just want to produce a more attractive, competitive, and easier to read report for your clients. From simple things such as changing the font size, type, and color to more advanced changes such as adding graphics and charts, company branding, and composites, the options are endless and are available through the use of your current Advent software. Sometimes the key is just asking the question - "Can this be done?" Consultants for the Advent Axys and APX products can answer these questions and produce the results that you desire quickly and efficiently.

Tandem Launches Informative New Site

Tandem Business Specialists has launched a brand new website! As we bid a fond farewell to the site that served us well for years, we are extremely excited to introduce our new online presence. We expect the new site to be much more valuable due to its enhanced functionality, and as our clients and partners already know, value, utility, and ease of use are fundamental principles of our organization. 

In the first phase of the new site, we added more information, made it easier to navigate, and integrated features that allow us to keep our content fresh and relevant. We now have more ways to communicate with interested members of the financial advisory and planning professions, current and prospective clients, and our industry partners.

Stay tuned for more site updates in the coming weeks and months as we take advantage of our newfound flexibility and communication opportunities. You can find us on Twitter and LinkedIn, we added a News You Can Use page, and you are reading an entry in our new blog. We look forward to sharing our thoughts and experiences as they relate to outsourcing and consulting in general, Advent's software products in particular, current goings-on at Tandem, and any number of other interesting and relevant topics.

We welcome your interaction and feedback, and we look forward to connecting with everyone that shares our interest in Advent software like Axys® and APX®, outsourcing, consulting, reporting, and/or any of the many other topics related to the work we do at Tandem Business Specialists.

Consultants as Partners, Not Doctors

Edgar Schein has been a driving force in the evolution of the practice of consulting (Lambrechts, Grieten, Bouwen, & Corthouts, 2009). This post focuses on an article in which Schein (1990) makes a compelling case for process consultation, which he contrasts with "expert" and "doctor" consulting roles.

The "expert" role works perfectly when a client knows exactly what the problem is - the client asks the right question, and the expert consultant offers a practical resolution. When the client is unsure of the exact problem, however, the expert is of no use.

When playing "doctor," the consultant diagnoses what's wrong with a problem area and recommends a solution to fix it. This seems quite logical, but it assumes the client has identified all the appropriate area(s) of concern and will provide all of the pertinent information necessary to arrive at the right conclusion, will accept the prescription, do what the doctor recommends, and remain healthy after the doctor leaves.

While they may be appropriate in certain circumstances, the expert and doctor roles in consulting disempower clients to productively resolve problems on their own, both during and after the consulting engagement, because they place excessive responsibility on the consultant. Consultants should help increase the client's ability to identify and resolve problems without creating an unhealthy dependence on outside experts.

Clients commonly expect consultants to play expert or doctor roles, and consultants are only too happy to oblige; we like to feel needed and respected for our unique knowledge and contributions. However, an inappropriate focus on the consultant's expert or doctor proficiencies tends to undermine the success of the consulting engagement. Clients take less ownership of identifying and resolving their problems, consultants don't gather enough information to provide the best possible guidance, and clients are relatively unlikely to fully implement the consultant's recommendations due to their low level of participation in creating those recommendations; it's human nature to more fully embrace the ideas you came up with and discount the value of someone else's suggestions (Bass, 2008).

Schaffer (1999) suggests a similar set of problems with the common consulting approach due to its exclusion of important client input in the assessment phase and the common absence of the consultant in the implementation phase. Lambrechts et al (2009) encourage a focus on the relational aspects of process consultation since, as opposed to a set of diagnostic tools or back-room analysis, the relationship between the consultant and client is the most important part of the consulting relationship.

It's important to note that Schein recommends against withholding expert advice when the client needs it, and some consulting engagements may require heavier reliance on the consultant's expertise. However, the consultant should avoid focusing excessively on the expert or doctor role whenever possible; these roles place excessive responsibility on the consultant while taking it away from the client, with whom it ultimately belongs.

References

Bass, B. M. (2008). The Bass handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.  

Lambrechts, F., Grieten, S., Bouwen, R., & Corthouts, F. (2009). Process consultation revisited: Taking a relational practice perspective. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(1), 39-58.

Schaffer, R. H. (1999). Replacing recommendations with results: A new paradigm for consulting. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 51(4), 242-251.

Schein, E. H. (1990). A general philosophy of helping: Process consultation. Sloan Management Review, 31(3), 57-64.

Operational Outsourcing as a Key to Business Longevity

In today's ever-changing market, how do you build your clients' trust while retaining them as a long-term customer? How do you acquire new clients and support an ever-growing business base?

The key is a focus on the evolution of your business with the clients' current and future objectives in mind.  From implementing a vision to constantly anticipating and meeting the needs that arise from your clients' ever-changing circumstances and preferences, firms must make a commitment to client service and transparency.

To assist in meeting these needs in the most cost effective and efficient manner, many successful industry leaders have chosen to engage outsourcing providers to assist with their data management functions.  By working with an outsourcing partner, these leaders can focus on critical business objectives and client-facing activities without the worry or time involved in managing the details of their back office operations.

An expert and experienced outsourcing partner has the specialized knowledge required to make optimal use of a firm's existing resources such as technology and data. Best of all, this partner can help a company avoid the overhead and cost associated with the full-time employees that would be required to perform the same functions.

For investment advisors, managers, and planners in particular, operational outsourcing solutions can provide a breadth of options for portfolio reporting, customization, and automation - further allowing advisors to expand the menu of services they offer to entice and educate clients.  These options coupled with the increased client facing opportunities allow for the improved transparency that so many clients desire. Transparency, communication, and client service are the keys to winning clients and gaining trust - these can be easily enhanced with a re-direction of business resources and an engagement in meaningful partnerships such as those found with successful outsourcing relationships.