Practice management

Going forward, investment advisors will no longer be able to include the value of an investor's home in a new $1 million minimum of investable assets now required to charge performance fees, according to the SEC, which is tightening its rule around fees.

DST Systems has designed a new program, Retirement Income Clearing Calculator, which will widely distribute retirement income products to sponsors and participants of defined contribution plans.

The combination of Baby Boomers heading into retirement and the arrival of Echo Boomers into savings programs is about to put financial advisors on the ride of their professional lives, according to the fourth-largest distributor of mutual funds in the United States.

Genworth Financial Wealth Management is the latest firm to announce an upgrade to its online platform, eWealthManager.

T. Rowe Price has launched a new web-based retirement-planning tool that it says will help investors envision their lives in retirement.

To help busy advisors increase the frequency with which they contact clients, Cetera recently launched a new online marketing solution, Connect2Client. It’s designed to enable advisors to send out emails, paper postcards, newsletters with in-depth articles and a variety of messages, including birthday greetings, on a regular basis.

NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext, has launched a post-trade monitoring tool for compliance officers.

In 2010, The Dreyfus Corporation gave iPads to every one of its 70 salespeople, to save on Federal Express billings in shipping them marketing materials. Now the manager of roughly $300 billion in mutual fund assets has decided that it should not be presenting its nine boards of directors with bulky binders any more, either.

If you think social media is all about you (i.e., the points your company wants to get across), think again.

Marketing expert Marie Swift says financial advisors who embrace videos, podcasts, recorded multimedia presentations and live online meetings can connect and build rapport with clients in a fraction of the time and more cost effectively than ever before.

A year ago, the firm’s more than 4,000 advisors in the United States had to manually submit each post in advance for review. Now, Raymond James Financials has automated the compliance and publishing process, to speed up communications with customers.

One problem advisors face when deciding to break away from a large firm and start their own RIA: timing. How soon is too soon to make the move? Can it be done without a very large book of business?

Less than half -- 45% -- of Generation X and Y investors plan to contribute to Individual Retirement Account accounts for the 2011 tax year, according to survey results from T. Rowe Price.

A boost in United States and global equity markets led in January to a 1.7% increase in the funded status of the typical U.S. corporate pension plan, according to a newly released report from BNY Mellon Asset Management.

The Department of Justice announced that it filed a notice with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss its antitrust lawsuit regarding the potential merger of Deutsche Boerse AG and NYSE Euronext.

The global effort by the U.S. government to catch American tax cheats intensified this week as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom agreed to support a broad new U.S. law requiring foreign financial institutions to disclose information about the foreign bank accounts of U.S. citizens.

Only 20 years ago, more than half of all American workers said they were on track to retire before they reached the age of 65. Today, only about 23% of Americans say they’ll be able to retire by that age. Here are the seven largest obstacles standing between your clients and an early retirement.

Steve Sanduski, The Prosperous Advisor, says too many advisors are stuck in a pattern that’s keeping them from making new connections and reaching their full potential. Here are five tips to help break that cycle.

Fifth Third Bank continues to build its high-net-worth service offering with two internal promotions.

At the end of last year’s fourth quarter, the average 401(k) balance was up almost 8% from the prior quarter, to $69,100. Fidelity Investments president of workplace investing, James M. MacDonald, called these results “encouraging.”