Practice management

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board would for the first time require broker-dealers to disclose to state and local governments that they are not fiduciaries and would prohibit underwriters from telling issuers not to hire financial advisors, under revised rule changes it filed Thursday.

Growth in its information technology and services business accounted for 11% of the $105 million increase in net revenue that NYSE Euronext reported for its third quarter.

The waves of financial regulations that are being introduced around the world "represent some of the biggest changes in financial services in 70 years." Here's what's changed and what you and your firm can do now to meet these new regulatory requirements.

Lincoln Financial Group has introduced Lincoln Alliance, a mutual fund retirement solution designed for small-to-mid-sized retirement plans with assets of $2 million or more.

Raymond James is partnering with Actiance to provide financial advisors access to compliant social media tools, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the firm is offering advisors optional marketing support with access to a library of pre-approved content and tools to measure engagement.

Be they young or be they old, people across America are worried about their financial prospects in retirement and the economic direction of the nation, according to a survey of Gen X, Gen Y and Baby Boomers by The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.

Seventy-five percent of U.S. companies that suspended their 401(k) matching contributions between January 2008 and January 2010 have restored the retirement savings perk in the past year, according to an analysis by professional services firm Towers Watson.

A Georgetown University professor has proposed a different idea in the ongoing debate over how investment advisors should be effectively regulated: outsource the heavy lifting to accounting firms.

Affluent pre-retirees with investable assets of at least $100,000 are more comfortable staying in the market than they were two years ago, a report from Phoenix Marketing International shows.

Societe Generale, the French investment bank, says that its new “relative value” algorithm will give fund managers the ability to change their participation to a stock’s performance relative to an underlying index.

Marketing expert Marie Swift says the “Marketing Ideas, Rapid Fire” session at the recent Garrett Planning Network annual retreat yielded a bunch of winning marketing ideas for financial advisors. Which ones can you or your firm implement right now?

High-net-worth investors are focused on preserving wealth rather than taking short-term risks in today’s volatile markets.

What is there to do on LinkedIn everyday? As it turns out, there are several powerful free tools that can help advisors market their practices as well as help them search effectively for new clients. Financial Planning senior editor Donna Mitchell says that planners who aren’t taking advantage of these functions (remember: they’re free) probably should be.

Mercer’s U.S. outsourcing business has begun including retirement income from Financial Engines in its defined contribution platform. Financial Engines says its Financial Engines Income+ is the first retirement income solution designed specifically for 401(k) plans.

U.S. households held $10.7 trillion in retirement assets at the end of 2010, according to a pair of retirement industry analysts who culled information from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds report and U.S. Census data. This is just above the previous high of $10.5 trillion reached in 2007, and a big climb from the $2.4 trillion loss in retirement assets in the crash of 2008, when these assets fell to $8.1 trillion.

Four of the world’s largest investment banks – Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and J.P. Morgan --- are now live on a new electronic margin call system called MarginSphere.

Financial planning and reporting technology provider Adaptive Planning has introduced its Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 Releases, which feature new reporting capabilities, SaaS and enterprise collaboration features.

Almost 30% of households with more than $5 million to invest are using four or more advisors.

UBS financial advisors take on 10 emerging entrepreneurs.

You may be overlooking one of the best PR strategies an advisor could employ.