Petition’s & Survey’s
I am going to cut my editorial up into two parts this month. First, I am going to touch on the signature petition that the folks at Laser App have initiated. Second, I am going to write a few words about a new service we will be providing to broker-dealers starting in January. We feel both will have a positive impact on the direction of broker-dealers.
First, the folks at LaserApp are working hard to forward “straight-through-processing”(STP) of securities, annuities, insurance and brokerage products through an electronic signature petition. The petition, sent on November 9th to broker-dealer executives, had within a week obtained 110 electronic signatures. Additionally, associations like FSI and NAIBD have also gotten involved with member mailings and high-level broker dealer signatures. The folks at LaserApp will be sending the results to the product carriers next week.
During my discussion with Robert Powell, he shared that the team at LaserApp is taking it upon themselves to educate both broker-dealers and product carriers alike. Their end goal is to facilitate the STP processing of carrier products by integrating electronic signatures, forms management, and where chosen, account on boarding. LaserApp whose philosophy has always been to integrate with solutions providers, will be kicking off a series of training sessions in January that will educate broker-dealer product carriers personnel. Topics to be covered in their webex’s will be: legality, best practices, and include demonstrations by vendors integrating with LaserApp. Additionally, LaserApp will be delivering a “New” monthly “STP Newsletter” that will showcase the progress of the movement. Included in the newsletter will be: carriers that approved E-Signature, next available training sessions, number of supporters and conferences where broker-dealer and carrier executives can join the movement.
The second piece of our “gleanings” editorial is the announcement of a new service that we here at Beacon Strategies, LLC will be providing to the broker-dealer community in 2010. Over the years we have been told by our clients, “you should provide research reports to broker-dealers.” In fact, we lost a piece of business this year because we were not published enough. Add to that, on July 1st when I hit fifty thousand domestic miles I decided that I really did not want to travel that much. So, on the plane ride home from Minneapolis, on the back of a napkin, our research service was created. This service will be known going forward as “The Beacon Report”. Our goal for providing these reports is to provide a landscape vision for broker-dealers. We will combine thought leadership, varying degrees of solution provider reviews, and a consumer reports like rating system based on hundreds of data points.
As always we are interested in providing information that is useful. We think the above is important and newsworthy. Hopefully you do too. In this month’s The Beacon we will be focusing on portfolio management systems. We are excited that Advent, Albridge, AssetBook, Broadridge – Aspire, Morningstar, Orion made submissions. We hope that the content is useful and allows you some new perspectives.