Practice

As the government builds a new regime for writing consumer protection rules, an existing bank regulator has put a twist on enforcing them.

Advisory clients, attorneys and other members of the public previously had to contact the staff at Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to get copies of disciplinary actions for firms and registered representatives.

To lead a successful financial advisory team an advisor needs four things: Communication, collaboration, structure and process, said William Stepanek of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in a workshop during IMCA’s annual conference.

A perfect storm of eroding Social Security trust funds, high unemployment and a flood of Baby Boomers all hitting retirement age at the same time will put enormous strain on Social Security for the next two decades, forcing retirees and their advisers to come up with alternative retirement income plans and strategies to make ends meet.

Many investors are unaware of the options available for their 401(k) left with a previous employer, Fidelity Investments found. Nearly one-third, 30%, who made a job transition are unsure of what to do with their workplace retirement savings.

Dividing up computing capacity inside an organization is not only cutting a company's ties to fixed-in place servers -- it's cutting the cords of managers to the hardware that they are supervising.

The two-day collapse of Amazon Web Services last month is the kind of incident that underscores the concern that continues to keep critical applications, such as Wall Street's trading programs, out of remote, hosted online services and data centers, said Geoff Tudor, chief cloud strategist at Hewlett-Packard Company.

Younger planners have a lot to offer the industry but can face numerous hurdles to success, according to Joseph D. Pitzl, director of financial planning at Intelligent Financial Strategies in Edina, Minn.

A perfect storm combination of eroding social security trust funds, high unemployment and a flood of Baby Boomers all hitting retirement age at the same time will put enormous strain on the system for the next two decades and result force retirees and their advisors to come up with alternative retirement income plans and strategies to make ends meet.

One-third cites protecting principal as their primary goal.