"Technology is the great equalizer for financial advisors, with the smallest advisors now having access to tools previously unavailable to all but the biggest firms."

Your Dot-Com Dividend

By John Bowen

Financial advisors today are well positioned to take advantage of the dot-com dividend. Billions of dollars have been invested in technology over the last few years, resulting in many significant new tools that can empower financial advisors to be much more productive when serving their clients.

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The challenge is to sort out those tools that can truly add value from those that will just distract you from your core competency of client relationship management. The dot-com dividend has given us many tools for account aggregation, portfolio management, client relationship management and operational management, but I'll save those for future articles. In this article I will focus on the personal productivity technology tools you should consider using today to be more effective in serving your clients.

Voice-recognition systems. For those who use two fingers to type, the introduction of voice-recognition systems that actually work has resulted in a huge increase in productivity. The three major players in voice-recognition systems are Microsoft, with a free system built into Office XP (www.microsoft.com/office/evaluation/indepth/ speech.asp), IBM ViaVoice (www-3.ibm.com/software/ speech) and Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Solutions (www.scansoft.com). While all work, Microsoft's Office XP is very limited in its effectiveness, and most users will be easily frustrated by its limited correction and command functions. Both IBM and Dragon are very good programs. I've found Dragon very effective for my own personal use given its flexibility for use not only in Office XP programs, but also in almost any other software application. I would recommend Dragon strongly for fellow two-fingered typists. While none of the programs is perfect yet, with a little bit of training you will find that your productivity increases significantly. I'm using Dragon to "type" this article.

Transcription services. Clients judge you by the quality of the questions you ask, and some of the more successful advisors are beginning to record their interviews. This accomplishes two goals. First, clients recognize that you believe their responses are important enough to be recorded. Second, you can focus on the interview process rather than on taking copious notes. Today, many digital voice recorders are available that allow you to record these conversations and upload them to your computer. Since digital voice files are extremely compressed, they require little memory, allowing you to store a virtually unlimited number on your computer. My favorite personal digital voice recorder is the Olympus DM-1, available at www.amazon.com. This recorder compresses its recordings in a proprietary Digital Speech Standard (DSS) format that is very user-friendly.

Collaborative software. When you're not a major player, you have to make up for your lack of size with agility. Collaboration tools can help you and your staff work more closely together, whether they're in your office or not. The most common example of a collaboration application is email. Most advisors have more email traffic than phone calls, so it's not surprising that email tools are among the fastest-selling ASP services to financial advisors. In my previous companies I've spent tens of thousands of dollars setting up servers for email with my IT staff. Today, more cost-effective outsourcing solutions are available. We have had a very good experience outsourcing our own Microsoft Exchange and Outlook support to Intermedia (www.intermedia.net).

As more and more financial advisors outsource the non-core competency components of their business, they are finding they need to share information in more timely and effective ways. We are using a Web-based collaboration and information-management software from eRoom Technology (www.eRoom.com) to quickly and easily design our own tracking system to monitor each project from kickoff through various stages of development. This ASP effectively creates a digital workspace with separate security levels that allow only specific employees or outsourced personnel access to files that you have given them permission to work with.

To share common documents among both internal and external workforces, you need to have standard software. For better or worse, the industry has effectively allowed Microsoft Office XP (www.microsoft. com/office) to emerge as the most recent standard. This latest version of Microsoft's highly successful suite of products is designed to facilitate collaboration.

For hard copies of documents that need to be shared electronically, the standard is Adobe Acrobat 5 (www.adobe.com). Combining Adobe Acrobat with a good scanner allows you to share all your documents exactly as they were intended to look in an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. One of my favorite collaborative applications is Webley (www.webley.com). It allows each member of our firm to have one toll-free phone number where they can receive calls, emails, faxes and voice mail. In addition, Webley offers many of the usual functions of an expensive PBX, like call forwarding, access to an address book, conference calling and call screening, but with no upfront costs.

Web search engines. The amount of information on the Internet is overwhelming. Search engines have been designed to effectively sort through this huge amount of data. In the past you had to make the choice of which search engine of several might be appropriate, and then sort through the hundreds of responses you received. Today I believe there is a clear winner in search engines that will meet almost all of your requests effectively. Google (www.google.com) has an uncanny talent for locating the exact sites that fit your query. Even better, there is a new Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) that increases your ability to find information. It takes only seconds to install alongside your Internet Explorer toolbar and allows you to quickly and easily use Google to search from any Web site without having to return to the Google home page.

Communication tools. With many of us less willing to travel but still having to make presentations out of our office, Web conferencing is being used with a much greater frequency. For a very nominal fee, Web conferencing ASPs create a virtual meeting center to bring everyone together. Two Web conferencing company providers that we have had experience with are WebEx Meeting Center (www.webex.com) and PlaceWare Conference Center (www.placeware.com). Both work reasonably well, although some patience is required for both. For smaller companies, WebEx is a much more cost-effective solution. It's easier to get started with and has an impressive list of services for sharing presentations, documents, applications and files.

If you create PowerPoint presentations for your clients, you might be interested in Microsoft's recently released Producer, an add-on application for PowerPoint 2002 that is designed for those who create audio and visual content for businesses. Microsoft promotes Producer as a solution for knowledge workers to take the guesswork out of capturing, synchronizing and publishing audio, video, slides and images into PowerPoint presentations.

For example, you could introduce a new client service using a PowerPoint presentation that includes several slides detailing your offering. Using Producer, you would be able to add a video or voice narration. The presentation then could be loaded onto your Web site for potential clients to view, or you could send it to them in a CD. We found that Producer helps create much more compelling presentations. However, there is a significant learning curve.

Microsoft Producer is a free add-on to PowerPoint 2002. To download it, go to office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/producer.aspx.

Most financial advisors greatly underutilize technology. Many are just too busy in their day-to-day operations to take the time to be introspective and evaluate how they can best incorporate technology into their practice. But technology is the great equalizer for financial advisors, with the smallest advisors now having access to tools previously unavailable to all but the biggest firms. Leveraging personal productivity technology will allow you to better and more cost effectively serve your clients. What are you waiting for?