In mid-March, I found a surprise Amazon package on my New Jersey doorstep. I’d been working from home to obey shelter-in-place orders and hadn’t ordered anything. The envelope rattled as I swabbed it with sanitizing wipes. When I ripped it open, a colorful puzzle emerged, along with a note: “Hi guys, here’s a little something to take your mind off things for awhile. Brighter days ahead!” It was from my financial planner. “We wanted clients to focus on spending quality time with their families...

Like me, you are no doubt working under very different conditions than just a month ago. As the coronavirus pandemic has upended our professional and personal lives, you may be meeting exclusively through Google Hangouts or Zoom, using spare space in your home for a new office, communicating with clients in innovative ways and reevaluating spending. In this environment, understanding how wealth management’s use of technology has evolved is more important than ever. For that reason, I am...

CHICAGO — Who benefits the most from innovation in financial services and advice? Not the client, says Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Josh Brown. And if he's right, continued industry disruption could have long-lasting — and positive — ramifications for planners. "The primary beneficiaries of innovation over the last 30 years, since the information and tech revolutions started, have been practitioners and advisers," Brown said during a Morningstar Investment Conference panel on financial...

A year ago this month, Advisor Group asked the planners affiliated with its network of independent broker-dealers if they had documented succession plans. The results from the 744 who responded weren’t particularly unusual, but that’s what made them disheartening. Almost 82% of the survey respondents said no, they hadn’t created a plan. The reason? More than half said they “couldn’t find the right person,” according to the survey. “Unlike a lot of businesses where you just sell to the highest...

The hints have been there for a while, but Financial Planning’s 32nd annual FP50 ranking of independent broker-dealers reveals what appears to be a solid trend: An industrywide shift to fee-based service, in which IBDs increasingly resemble RIAs. “The revenue figures among the top 50 IBD’s reveal the evolution,” Craig Israelsen tells me. Israelsen, a professor of financial planning at Utah Valley University and a longtime Financial Planning contributing writer, has analyzed the rankings for...