A new client portfolio management program called PowerBroker sets a new standard for user-friendliness.

Those of you who were just a little bit cynical about Advent's motives for buying its independent competitor Techfi received a bit of confirmation this week, when the company sent out a discouraging notice to all TechFi users. The note said, among other things, "Advent Software, Inc. Has decided to end support for Advent/Techfi packaged software products"--including WebOffice, Enterprise, Essentials and "any derivatives, accessories or special versions of these products." The rug will be officially pulled on June 30, 2005, and the message says that Techfi users can get wonderful discounts on Advent products.

The Techfi/Advent soap opera has been a discouraging story in the advisor marketplace. At a time when Schwab Institutional had announced that Centerpiece/Portfolio Center would be supported only for advisors who had assets custodied at Schwab, and when Advent and Schwab were sparring over who owned the client data (not the advisors?), Techfi seemed like a great alternative. It was built on a modern SQL server platform, was fully-relational, and the company did not seem to be quite as greedy as some of its competitors.

Advisors migrated to the promising new Techfi software, and then Advent ended this competitive threat by purchasing its rival, bringing the renegade planners unhappily back into their fold. Now they're pretty much stuck with Advent.

Or are they? Unlike the olden days of three or four years ago, today we have several alternative platforms available, including the new--IAS (www.optima-tech.com)--and the old--a revitalized dbCAMS (www.dbcams.com). But the best news of all is that on September 30, a new software company called Cornerstone Revolutions will introduce a portfolio reporting program called PowerBroker that resembles Techfi's offering. It's built on a modern platform (SQL Server and .net generic data porting capabilities); the price is very competitive ($2,250 for the first year, $750 a year thereafter, plus $400 per additional user) and the company was created by and for independent advisors in the planning profession.

The idea for the new program came slowly. Company president, Angela Lyles, has worked as an operations manager with a broker-dealer, later with an independent planning firm on the West Coast, and as a software/systems consultant for planners nationwide. "I've used Advent, Centerpiece, dbCAMS, CAPTOOL, all of them," she says. "And after a while, watching people struggle, I thought that there has to be an easier way to do downloads and get the information you need out of your system in the format that you need." She also cites ease of learning (or lower cost of training) and compliance reporting as the kind of features advisors are looking for.

So what does PowerBroker offer? You can find some tutorials at www.powerbrokertools.com, which walk you through enough of the program that you will probably know how to use it in your office. The program currently has download protocols with Ameritrade, Fidelity, Schwab, Waterhouse, DST Fanmail and Pershing, and if you decide to add a second custodian, there's a simple way to load the new download protocol on your machine in a couple of minutes. "We're developing new custodial interfaces as people ask for them," says Scott Keller, the company's chief admin. officer.

Of course, you can also customize the kind of securities that your clients hold, although the normal options like stocks, bonds, funds and annuities are already built in. Downloads seem to be a little simpler than with other programs, in part because the system automatically flags cases where data has come from the custodian that isn't the same as what you have (making reconciliations a little less troublesome), in part because the navigation through the system can be described as "as easy as a spreadsheet with tabs."

The menu bar at the top takes you to different areas: to a listing of clients (with all of their accounts and details of their accounts across the page in a spreadsheet-like format). For more details, click on name (you get the client's contact information on the right half of the screen) account (the right side of the screen provides more details including value, inception date, tax ID number and custodian) and you can filter on any column: client, account type, account number, goal etc. When you've called up details, click on an edit button at the bottom to change any of the information. You can also modify the drop-down menus on the fly.

There were two additional features which I haven't seen anywhere. One is a series of compliance reports. "I've been through audits myself, in my own firm and with my consulting clients," says Lyles. "Sometimes it takes hours to get what you want out of the system, and a lot of times the one-advisor office doesn't know exactly what they're supposed to get. The information is not in a retrievable format." To solve that problem, Keller and Lyles hired compliance consultants to design forms that will deliver the kind of information that is most commonly requested in an SEC audit. "We ended up with 15 different forms," says Keller. "So the information is there whenever it is asked for."

For example? One form lists each client along the left, and there are columns that tell you whether they have signed the fee agreement (and, for each client, the date it was signed), the most recent date that somebody at the firm reviewed the client's portfolio holdings with the client, the most recent time the ADV was offered, when the policy statement was signed (if applicable), and when the most recent ISP review took place. Another form lists all taxable accounts in one table, non-taxable accounts in another, listing the account number, type of account, inception date and current market value. An overall compliance review form, meanwhile, lists each client, account numbers and types, inception dates, custodian, whether it's a discretionary account, the types of fees that are/are not assessed and the account's current market value.

The other feature I liked was called QuickEntry. As Lyles explains it, this has several functions. If a prospect comes in, you can ask for their latest brokerage statements and input the summary data--the beginning and ending values and the cash flows. "It gives you an immediate dollar-weighted return that you can give to the client as a report," Lyles explains. This immediately differentiates you from the brokerage house whose statement provided raw numbers which were impenetrable in regards to rate of return or rate compared with a blended benchmark.

Another use, of course, is to be able to take past client statements and enter them into the system, so you have performance data going back before the relationship began. And if you get more information, the screens allow you to provide more detailed data on client accounts, down to the level of detail provided by the downloads. If you aren't quite ready to sign up for one of the account aggregation services, but you want to include a client's 401(k) in your performance statement, this is a relatively simple, painless way to do it.

One of the best things about Techfi was its open architecture; unlike some of the larger competitors, it actually allowed you to move data out of the program into another platform. PowerBroker has the same features--and, indeed, is built on the same basic architecture. Users are encouraged to ask for new customized reports; the company's programmers are hoping to have enough available so that virtually any advisor will find what he/she needs--and if not, ask to have one created for you.

Unfortunately, Advent's purchase of Techfi injected some difficult cynicism into the competitive environment; Lyles and Keller are constantly being asked if they plan to sell the company, and advisors are understandably leery of porting their data to a new system, only to find themselves back in the clutches of their old service provider. Lyles denies any such intentions, and she sounds quite sincere. But the truth is that this is more up to the advisory community than it is up to them. If advisors want a healthy, competitive marketplace, then they will need to give some attention to every new mousetrap in their midst, and support the products they like even if it means dealing with the inconvenience of converting data. Techfi users are especially encouraged to check out PowerBroker, because the data conversion from one open architecture system to another should be relatively easy. Others should check out the tutorials and decide if they like what they see.

Personally, I'm hoping the company enjoys a great first year of life, and that we have one more genuine competitor in a market that sure could use one. Welcome Angela and Scott; live long and prosper. And don't sell out to the big guys.

Reprinted with permission from Inside Information (http://www.bobveres.com).

Inside Information is a practice management information service for financial planners.