TECH TOOLS
signatures. Powell told the audience
that e-signatures are necessary to
enable the straight-through processing of new account forms, account
transfers and the like. He also provided an overview of the laws that
authorized e-signatures: the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act of
1999 and the Electronic Signatures in
Global and National Commerce Act
of 2000, which is also known as the
E-Sign Act.
The E-Sign Act bars the rejection
of electronic signatures if the denial
is based solely on the fact that the
signature is electronic, Powell said.
He also examined the different types
of electronic signatures and the four
major e-signature providers: Docu-Sign, Adobe EchoSign, SigniX and
Topaz Systems.
A tiny, portAble
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In addition, Advent made it clear
that it is seeking integration partners in
areas outside of its core competency,
such as CRM and financial planning.
Peter Hess, the president and CEO
of Advent Software, acknowledged
some mistakes in the past with regard
to Advent’s positioning in the RIA
space, but vowed to correct them.
“When I walked into the Technology
Tools for Today Conference in February of 2010, I realized that there was
device lets you
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Orion’s technology. By deploying new
servers and upgrading existing ones
to SQL Server 2012, Orion will move
to a 64-bit platform, improving server
performance. It is also investing about
$1million to upgrade its storage area
network, which makes data available
to servers. According to Clarke, the
new system will be five times more
capable than the existing one.
These upgrades, combined with
multithreading technology, will
improve processing time significantly. For example, a rebalance
process that now takes an hour for
20,000 accounts will soon be completed in a matter of minutes, Clarke
estimates.
This month, Orion will also be
upgrading its integration capabilities to include new reporting capa-
E-signatures are the leading remaining impediment to the wide
deployment of straight-through processing. But that should change.
AdventConneCt
The big news out of the AdventConnect Conference in Las Vegas
was the rollout of Advent’s new technology plan, dubbed the Enterprise-Plus Cloud Strategy. The company’s
hybrid approach offers Advent customers cloud and mobility functionality without requiring them to forgo
their existing server/desktop software installations.
The goal is to provide a unified cross-platform experience to users of various
Advent products. If successful, this
strategy will allow the firm to update
some of the functionality of Advent
products more rapidly with a cloud-based replacement. It will also allow
Advent to extend some of the functionality products like APX and Geneva to
the iPad and other mobile devices.
a whole RIA ecosystem that we were
unaware of,” he says. “That was one
of the factors that led to the Black Dia-
mond acquisition. We are totally com-
mitted to the RIA market, and we are
totally committed to regaining cred-
ibility with RIAs.” [Full disclosure: I’m
a co-producer of the conference.]
Hess added that he intends to make
sure that Black Diamond, which was
acquired in 2011, has all of the resources
it needs to deliver portfolio manage-
ment and performance reporting for
registered investment advisors.
Gemini orion
At the Gemini Orion conference in
Grapevine, Texas, Eric Clarke, the pres-
ident and founder of Orion Advisor
Services, announced that his firm was
making a major investment to upgrade
bilities. For example, it will be able
to integrate elements from a Money-
GuidePro financial plan right into
Orion reports. (Think of “reports”
as a broad term — the financial
planning elements will be available
in paper reports, Web reports and
the client portal, and through the
mobile app.)
