In 2007, Fidelity said it was pouring $50 million into the development of WealthCentral, "the strongest and most integrated platform in the industry," according to then-Fidelity IWS president Jack Callahan.

A matter of survival

"RIAs are demanding this type of advisor platform," says Alois Pirker, a senior analyst with Aite Group, a Boston-based research and consulting firm. "With WealthCentral, Fidelity is offering both a line-up of 'best-of-breed' third-party business applications and an unprecedented level of technology integration."

WealthCentral links Advent's Portfolio Exchange, Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand and EISI's Naviplan financial-planning application, e-signature capabilities from DocuSign and portfolio modeling and rebalancing from Northfield Information Services. It's compatible with custodial data from Fidelity and other custody vendors.

A thoughtful approach to front-office wealth-management operations can go a long way toward ensuring that technology is serving advisors rather than burdening them with busywork. Right now the time many advisors spend fiddling with disparate client-service applications eats into the time they can spend working directly with or on behalf of clients -- a particularly vexing issue now that clients' nerves have been rubbed raw by declining asset values against a backdrop of general economic malaise.

Front-office efficiency is important in the fight for private-client investment assets. In 2005, U.S. consumers held $17 trillion in investable assets. Privately held U.S. assets could hit the $30 trillion mark by 2010, according to one pre-financial-crisis estimate. Even if this rate of growth has been sharply curtailed, the demographic weight of an aging baby-boom generation -- already heading into retirement and set to continue in that direction for another 25 years -- augurs well for wealth managers positioned to capture assets.

Past and present -- tense

In this context, sloppy and time-consuming front-office operations are a detriment getting and holding market share, according to a 2007 Aite report called Evaluating Wealth Management Advisor Platforms: Integrating the Front Office.

And firms that don't ensure their advisors are operating at generally competitive levels of productivity are setting themselves up for takeover -- and, these days especially, not always on favorable terms.

A new Moss Adams report commissioned by Fidelity suggests that 69% of RIAs are either integrating systems or have attempted to do so in the past. Advisors see the primary benefit of integration as greater operational efficiencies. The main reason they give for not going in for integration is their inability to identify appropriate solutions.

Moss Adams, a Seattle-based accounting and consulting firm, uses Schwab's PortfolioCenter in its own Wealth Services unit.

But Schwab and Fidelity aren't the only names in the front-office technology game. Odyssey, Thomson Financial, NorthStar Systems International and Finantix also integrate technologies; Orion Advisor Services, AdviceAmerica and SunGard provide advisor platforms based on all-proprietary technologies -- Orion as an all-in service-bureau offering.

The response from advisors to WealthCentral has so far been overwhelming, according to Fidelity IWS executive v.p. says Scott Dell'Orfano. "Advisors see that efficiency is a way to help enhance profitability," he says. "WealthCentral is designed to address this need by helping to relieve advisors of the burdens of managing technology and conducting data reconciliation."

Boston-based Fidelity's IWS had more than $335 billion in custodial assets at the end of September 2008. -FWR