NFS Launches New Workstation For Advisers: Fidelity Unit Sets Sights On Big Outsourcing Prospects
July 20, 2009
Long seen as the clearer of trades for bank brokerage units, Fidelity Investment's National Financial Services unit launched a new brokerage workstation last week that aims to give correspondent brokers the wealth-management firepower to attract financial advisers away from top Wall Street firms.
NFS also hopes to use its new workstation, developed in conjunction with Thomson Reuters, to go after big self-clearing brokers, which may have hundreds or even thousands of financial representatives but are looking to outsource components of their technology and operations.
The new platform combines risk management, trading and processing features of NFS' Streetscape workstation with financial planning, performance reporting and market information tools in Thomson Reuter's Thomson ONE wealth management workstation. This will give NFS' fully-disclosed correspondents, for which clearers manage the books and records, more ability to support full-service reps. Those reps typically run commission- and fee-based advisory businesses and require custom reports and financial plans for clients, and they often actively manage client assets.
On the correspondent front, "it's been a void," says Al Moore, president of Smith Hayes Financial Services, a full-service brokerage headquartered in Lincoln, Neb., that supports 38 full-time advisers and 18 independent advisers.
Full-service reps typically are dually registered as Series 7 securities brokers and registered investment advisers (RIAs), providing sophisticated financial planning and investment advisory services to individuals and at times to companies and other organizations.
NFS wants to help clients pick up business from the big Wall Street brokerages, often in the form of breakaway brokers who are leaving those firms and looking for homes at smaller, less tainted brands.
That's a goal, for instance, of 24-year-old Smith Hayes. It cleared through Correspondent Services Corp. (CSC), the clearing operations of PaineWebber, one of Wall Street's top full-service brokerages, when it was acquired by UBS in 2000.
Fidelity acquired CSC from UBS in 2003, prompting concerns among CSC's many full-service correspondents about their fit at the clearer, which historically had catered to more transaction-oriented bank and insurance investment units. "NFS offered some tools, but they weren't very robust, so the workstation integrated with Thomson ONE is very interesting to us," Moore says.
Smith Hayes has been piloting the workstation since January. Since it could not be used with clients in the pilot stage, the workstation was put on the desks of 12 adviser assistants. Moore says his firm is especially interested in the additional reporting capabilities, enabling sector allocations, a household view of accounts, detailed information about fixed-income investments, and mining client data for additional business opportunities.
He also points to the "bricklets" an adviser can compose, so he or she can be greeted upon a single sign-on by a variety of information, ranging from the top 10 accounts in terms of assets under management, to all new accounts over the last 30 days, to client birthdays and anniversaries over the next 30.
The new workstation, carrying two brands in the Streetscape & Thomson ONE name, represents a third Fidelity workstation. NFS' Streetscape workstation is aimed at transaction-based broker-dealers. The HybridOne workstation is aimed at registered investment advisers.
The transaction and processing capabilities of Streetscape were integrated into Thomson ONE using the Microsoft.Net framework for delivering services over the Web. That platform's emphasis on open architecture allows third-party applications to "integrate and interact quite easily," says Dan Reynolds, vice president in charge of the new workstation at NFS, adding that benefits "not only us but also clients" who want to maintain favorite applications.
