Advest Picks netDecide’s Wealth-Management Platform

The Advest Group, Inc., a regional brokerage firm based in Hartford, Conn., has licensed the netDecide Wealth-Management System, giving financial advisers a comprehensive set of wealth-management tools to create their own financial plans without keying in client and position data.

"My contention is that the adviser will use the tools much more readily if you cut down on the amount of data entry they have to engage in," says John Wellington, Advest's senior vice president and director of wealth management and advisory services.

Advest, a subsidiary of The MONY Group--an insurance- and financial-services company-- initially plans to roll out the Web-based platform to 525 financial advisers located across 90 branch offices and 16 states plus the District of Columbia. But the soup-to-nuts-site licensing agreement entitles the brokerage firm to deploy investment analytics, financial-planning and workflow tools across its entire retail-sales force of up to 1,000 users.

Wellington expects to have a development version of the product by April 1, with a launch out to advisers beginning in June.

This chalks up another win for netDecide, which was recently selected by Legg Mason, R.W. Baird and Morgan Keegan. The fact that three other regional-brokerage firms "with a similar footprint" picked the vendor was a deciding factor, says Wellington.

The two main criteria driving Advest's selection of netDecide were a Web-based system and strong data integration with the firm's back-office and client and position data. In addition, Advest was seeking a system that had strong portfolio analytics and asset-allocation modules, and that allowed for collaborative sharing of information between the financial advisers and the central-financial-planning department once the plans were created.

"The biggest problem were systems with no data entry, they were entirely manual entry from the get-go," notes Wellington, who says he has been looking at wealth-management systems for the past three years--when Advest was acquired by The MONY Group--before making this decision that was announced on March 4.

In the past, to produce a plan for the client, registered representatives would have to sit and manually load the client data. Advest, a correspondent of Wexford Clearing, receives a daily download of all client and position data, which it maintains in a Microsoft SQL database. NetDecide can then take an electronic feed from the back office and pre-populate netDecide with the client's data, such as name, age, date of birth, as well as the position data, which is the most tedious to enter, says Wellington.

Right now, the majority of the financial plans produced by Advest are created by Wellington's team, which enters the data manually. Wellington declined to reveal the name of the financial-planning product, other than to say "it is a well-known commercial product that is used by a lot of other firms.

Another drawback to the incumbent system is that it contains a proprietary report-writer engine, which means that advisers need to have the same software to print out the reports.

"Some of the advisers that have been frustrated by the capacity issue have bought their own software that we use in the home office," says Wellington, who explains that it is the same software package. But because it is a desktop system, and not Web-based, he adds, "It's not integrated with our data in any way. So whatever plans they produce, there's no way to share the output."

Since the plans have to be checked before they go out to clients, a lot of time is spent copying, printing and delivering the reports from the home office to the advisers.

Wellington says that if the data entry is electronic, then advisers can easily call the home-office team and consult with them. Since not all advisers will choose to use the tool, they can use netDecide's Dashboard product to submit requests for plans. Wellington estimates the team will save 600 man-hours per month because they'll be able to check the plan without having to make photocopies, and mail these 20- 40-to-60-page reports back and forth.

Now, "we'll deliver the plan in an electronic PDF document format, make any corrections in the (netDecide) Dashboard tool and it can be returned to them," says Wellington. "The ability to collaborate internally was a huge factor in our decision making," he emphasizes. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio