Practice management

Marketing professionals are quick to suggest that the best way to find success as a financial advisor is niche marketing. Marketing expert Marie Swift delves into exactly what niche marketing is and why advisors should care.

Business is running smoothly now, but Financial Planning senior editor Donna Mitchell says ARGI Financial had to overcome some operational hurdles — ultimately changing custodians and back-office systems — to get to this point.

iPhone 4S sales are off the charts, even with its battery issues. iPad sales are similar. Android now is the most popular operating system for mobile phones. So why aren’t more financial services firms encouraging employees to bring their own devices to work?

The Financial Services Authority has for the first time ever barred a compliance officer from working in the financial services industry.

Almost seven in 10 U.S. households that own traditional IRAs have developed strategies for managing income and assets in retirement, according to a study released last week by the Investment Company Institute.

Retirement plan advisors’ top five concerns include new disclosure rules, market volatility, finding greater flexibility and customization in plans, measuring a given plan’s success and an expected redefinition of fiduciary status.

Most advisors don’t have a disaster recovery plan. We all like to think it won’t happen to us when we think of the big ones -- tornado or hurricane -- but all firms and advisors need to be prepared for anything that can cause an interruption to our business and serving our clients. Here's what you need to know to get started.

The SEC charged a longtime Bernie Madoff employee with fraud for his role in creating fake trades to facilitate the massive Ponzi scheme.

Marketing expert Marie Swift says the end of the year is a perfect time to review everything in an advisor’s marketing toolkit. This week, she talks about the importance and value of the power bio and the core issues article.

The SEC's newly enacted Rule 13h-1 requires “large traders” to register to be assigned an identification number that will allow tracking of its transactions.

The SEC has ordered broker-dealer FTN Financial Securities to pay nearly $2 million for allowing a registered investment advisor, Sentinel Management, to defraud its clients through a reverse repurchase transaction.

Russell Investments has launched an iPad-friendly version of its Helping Advisors website.

Financial professionals, 86% of whom have at least one social media account, risk running afoul of compliance rules as regulatory bodies sort out the rules for advisors’ use of these new channels. That was the message from social medial expert Alexandra Basak Russell, at the Women Advisors Forum in Huntington Beach, Calif.

A recent survey of 1,000 mass affluent investors uncovered a statistic that startled researchers: 75% of men said they wanted their spouse or partner to take more a more responsible role with their joint money.

A lot more mass affluent investors know what a CFP is than was the case just a few months ago. That’s what an early study of the CFP Board’s 4-year, $40 million advertising and brand awareness campaign shows, the board reported in a media briefing this week.

When FINRA at the outset of 2010 issued its first set of guidelines on how to use social media (Notice 10-06), lots of questions ensued. Here's an interactive slideshow detailing what advisors, broker-dealers and financial services firms need to know to navigate FINRA's social media guidelines.

Tweets have now been turned into formatted streams of market data.

Leaders of the Financial Services Institute expressed cautious optimism about their efforts to dilute or derail an initiative under way at the Department of Labor to broaden the scope of the term "fiduciary," a top policy priority for the advocacy organization.

Living more frugally and paying off debt has paid off for one in five retirees -- but fewer are looking out to the future to estimate how long their assets will last in retirement.

Financial advisors are increasingly interested in hearing from asset managers’ marketing teams in a digital format, accessible via the Web, according to Kasina’s latest FA Vision report, created in conjunction with Horsesmouth.