Heartland Advisors, Inc. (“Heartland”) is an independently owned Milwaukee-based firm established in 1983. As of November 30, 2011, the Firm managed approximately $4.9 billion in assets for institutional and high net worth clients and the Heartland family of value-driven mutual funds. (more…)

Al Hewitt Inc./Hewitt Financial Group (HFG), headquartered in Palmdale, CA, is a combination fee-only Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and tax preparation firm serving 6,000 clients between its two offices in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. (more…)

When six portfolio managers left their former firm and formed Palladium Registered Investment Advisors in 2008, it gave them the opportunity to break away from their paper-based office.

As Jennifer L. Litchfield, IT Manager at Palladium, remembers it, onboarding more than 1,000 accounts all at once left almost no time to learn a new electronic document management system in their new Norfolk, VA, offices—even as the need to implement one to ensure the breakaway firm could hit the ground running was clear.
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Since it was founded in 1990, Gitterman & Associates Wealth Management, LLC has grown from a five-person Financial Firm to a dually-registered firm with 25 employees handling $225M AUM on its RIA side and over $400M AUM on its broker-dealer side. With this growth came the need to manage more client information and business records—and, now as a dually registered RIA/B-D, to meet separate compliance standards for both FINRA and the SEC.
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For Michigan’s Rehmann Financial, compliance became more of an issue as the RIA firm grew and regulatory concerns increased. With 100 staff members—including 30 advisors—spread out across 13 offices in two states, sharing, accessing and tracking information had become “really clunky,” as Operations Manager Amy Flourry puts it.

“For us, there’s a real link between operations and compliance,” explains Flourry.
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Time is money, especially for a busy firm like Renaissance Financial Corporation of St. Louis, MO. With offices in St. Louis, Omaha, NE, Lincoln, NE, and Kansas City, KS, keeping information moving was crucial.

As Renaissance staff explain, when an advisor is spending time searching through paperwork, that’s less time he or she has to focus on what the firm is known for: managing securities and investment plans, offering quality advisory services and helping with small business planning. “The more time advisors spend finding paperwork, the less time they have to spend building client relationships. We’re constantly trying to find ways to streamline processes so they don’t have to spend time doing administrative tasks.”
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Established in 1941, the Morehead Group is a financial services firm providing strategic insurance solutions for affluent individuals and families. Located in Charlotte, NC, the firm has a team of three principals and seven associates who provide everything from underwriting and policy evaluation to client services and administration.

Kenneth Samuelson, one of the firm’s principals, brings over twenty years of experience in the financial services industry to his clients. With this experience, Samuelson places an emphasis on technology to get the maximum potential out of his operations. “I refer to it as tightening the bolts,” he says. “We need to get as much as we can out of our technology investments and make our operations faster and more efficient—and make our staff happier.”
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Cambridge Financial Group, a Columbus, OH-based registered investment advisor managing assets of around $1 billion, is committed to technical efficiency – with good reason. With 12 employees managing 4,000 active accounts from 32 different brokers and supporting Delivery Versus Payment (DVP) accounts for over 50 banks, Cambridge has to maximize the productivity of each staff member.

That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.
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