Practice management: archive
Every Practice management story in Advisors, newest first. 315 stories
1 story
Bitwise's crypto models rebalance on Vise's engine, alongside the rest of the book
The crypto sleeve now follows the same rebalancing schedule and tax treatment as every other holding, which is the version of digital assets that scales across a book.
1 story
A 45-year veteran is selling listening as a credential
The 100,000-advisor shortfall will keep getting answered with transition checks until firms decide the discovery conversation is worth training and screening for.
2 stories
The 15 million self-employed are the uncovered workers advisers can call
EIG's 76.2 million uncovered workers split into two prospect lists, and only one of them can be dialed directly.
The internship is becoming advisory recruiting's cheapest fit test
Amplified's Externship drew more than 2,800 students this summer, and the firms folding it into their own programs are buying what a resume cannot show.
9 stories
The fee case built on gross returns is the weakest one
A Journal of Financial Planning paper inventories what planners actually deliver, and that list is a stronger client conversation than any performance comparison.
A goals-based plan pays most when the client ranks the goals
The 2015 Blanchett paper prices the conversation most practices run informally: which goals get funded, and in what order.
FPA wants “financial planner” protected before it has defined the bar
A protected title would flow into every bio page, pitch deck and conference badge where the phrase is used as a claim, tested against standards the association has yet to write.
Consolidation stalls on the calendar and the calculator, not the client
Three studies show advisers chasing household assets without the hours or the numbers to back the pitch clients never hear.
Savvy's new platform has 150 users, no outside clients and no price
For an RIA weighing custodians, the introducing-broker model moves revenue rather than assets, and the terms that would decide the switch stay unpublished until a 2027 onboarding window.
NASAA's fee waiver settles the cheapest line in the budget
The firm-level IARD waiver runs through 2027 and the rep fee holds at $15, leaving the compliance hours that scale with headcount as the real cost of state registration.
Savvy's custody pitch is software over Fidelity's rails
Comparing platforms means pricing the workflow above clearing—and asking what the 90-second number includes.
The Muse Selloff Prices the Part of Advice an App Can Do
Tuesday's tape marked down Schwab, Ameriprise and Raymond James over one consumer app — and the layer it threatens is the layer most practices still bill for.
The rollover memo works best when it says stay put
The CFP Board's rollover framework turns the advisor's built-in fee conflict into a written, client-specific analysis, and the firms that run it at every separation event will convert more of them.
2 stories
The videos won 80,000 followers; the offer won the clients
Nate Hoskin's educational videos drew 80,000 followers and almost none of the right clients, until a switch to subscription planning fees produced 172 clients and close to $1 million in annual revenue.
Human in the loop means three things. Ask which one.
A vendor can claim the phrase with no expert training behind the model, and the advisor who clicks approve absorbs the risk.
5 stories
E-delivery saves postage and hands advisors a consent ledger
The SEC's comment window on Regulation E-Delivery has closed with more than 80,000 letters filed, and the two opt-out notices are the practice's real bill.
Half of plan holders still worry: sell the family meeting.
Fidelity's poll of investors 55 and older finds a completed plan buys less peace of mind than the industry assumes, turning the heir conversation into a growth strategy.
Schwab's Q4 connector is where Claude's advisor pitch gets tested
Anthropic's advisor assistant arrives with eleven integration partners and exactly one custodian, and the license fee is the smallest part of what a practice is being asked to buy.
Merrill will sell asset managers a map of its advisors' books
The $125,000-to-$860,000 packages price the practice itself, and the advisors who generate the fees are not parties to the trade.
The compliance manual is the next deal term
Two bipartisan bills would rewrite ensemble pay and elder-exploitation duties, and the repricing lands on the practice before either statute does.
1 story
The commission fix that lands on the balance sheet
Two bipartisan measures with real vote counts would change how ensemble practices get paid and how firms handle suspected elder exploitation. The desk feels both before the statutes land.
2 stories
The cheapest alpha an RIA can buy is a one-page memo
Most RIAs lose hundreds of hours a year to implementation drag; the fix is a one-page brief with a named owner at the bottom.
Fix the process before you buy the AI tool
An Ezra Group consultant's sequencing argument lands on the least glamorous line of the AI budget: the operations work no license covers.
2 stories
Referrals don't compound; the conversion desk does
Wealth Enhancement's Aisling Carroll argues durable growth is built in role clarity, conversion capacity, and integration timing rather than in the volume of introductions.
Claude's advisor plug-in closes the integration gap and opens a meter
A connector that reaches across the whole stack is worth signing only for firms that already know what the work cost before it arrived.
9 stories
MoneyGuide can now model the annuity inside the plan
The income floor now sits in the same projection as the portfolio, moving the decumulation fight from illustration to product selection.
Your firm's manual now decides which side gigs survive
The SEC narrowed what brokerages must monitor, kept the sales-compensation trigger, and left every firm to write the list that actually governs an advisor's outside business.
The SEC just gave examiners a checklist for your annual review
The annual compliance review now has a published yardstick — firms that treat it as paperwork will feel it first.
NASAA holds its $15 rep fee flat; the ledger is the cost
The firm-level IARD waiver now runs through 2027, which fixes the cheap part of state registration while the per-representative workload keeps growing.
Advisors want client time; AI is buying back emails
Vanguard's 72% time priority gives practices the benchmark for judging where AI belongs, and the survey's usage data shows most are still a layer away from the client-facing hours they say they want.
The 5% foundation payout floor is now a client audit trigger
Average payout at the largest private foundations was 5.1% in 2024, handing advisors a benchmark and a warning for private foundation clients.
Ask what the decision solved before you call it a mistake
Kitces and Richards would have advisors rebuild a client's reasoning before they rebuild the portfolio; the answer is what justifies the rewrite.
Healthcare's fiscal trajectory belongs in every decumulation model
The Tax Foundation's fiscal math argues for stress-testing federal healthcare subsidies and the employer-coverage exclusion the way advisors already stress-test equity returns.
Claude for advisors hits the workflow wall
The connectors are the proof of concept, and the practices that never wrote down a baseline will have no way to know whether the tool moved anything.
5 stories
Ridgeline’s $250M raise matters to advisors for who wrote it
An invitation-only round led by the founder buys the platform time to finish the reconciliation build its RIA clients have already signed up for.
RIA buyers have more capital than ever; holding period now wins deals
Eight ways to fund an RIA acquisition, and the one term that decides whether the seller's team survives it: the buyer's return model.
SEC approves FINRA's outside-business rewrite and leaves firms the discretion that matters
Rule 3290 removes the paperwork on bartending and weekend refereeing and says broker-dealers need not supervise a dual registrant's RIA; how much of that relief survives is decided in each firm's compliance manual.
FMG Suite bets the follow-up email is the growth bottleneck
Seven launch partners route meeting recaps and prospect intake through one API layer; the practices whose records already agree will benefit most.
Legacy Positions Are Fiduciary Work, Billable or Not
Rich Chen's guest post for Kitces maps the traps that turn a new client's concentrated stock into an exam finding — and puts the fee question squarely back in the firm's lap.
1 story
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.