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.”
Full story »

If you’ve ever enrolled in an employer-sponsored voluntary insurance program, you know all about the stacks of paper that come with. It’s easy then to imagine the massive volume of paperwork that companies such as Seattle, WA-based Administrative Systems, Inc. (ASI) process behind the scenes. As a voluntary benefits administration firm, ASI handles thousands of documents every day for employers, carriers and other employee benefit providers. And now, thanks to their Laserfiche system, ASI staff are enjoying a few benefits of their own—reduced processing times, simplified compliance and faster access to information. Full story »

In a year marked with more bank failures than we’ve seen since the height of the savings-and-loan crisis, D.L. Evans Bank, a family-owned institution with 22 branches, 320 employees and $875 million in managed assets, has cause to celebrate. Its ten-year use of Laserfiche has netted the 105-year-old, Idaho-based bank a wealth of dividends, including:

• Faster audits.
• Streamlined lending.
• Improved business continuity planning.
• More efficient processes for opening new accounts.
• A 33% reduction in hard copy document production and an 85% reduction in paper storage.

Full story »

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.
Full story »

Kowal Investment Group, LLC is a fee-based financial advisor from Waukesha, WI, that has specialized in financial planning and investment advising for over 35 years. The firm manages nearly $200 million in assets and also hosts a weekly financial advice radio show called “The Retirement Clinic.” But just as baby boomers looking into retirement look to Kowal for advice, Kowal itself began looking to retire its old way of filing paper. “We knew we wanted to move toward the paperless office,” explains Michelle Rossi-Weida, Operations and Compliance Manager for Kowal. “Just in terms of better organization and also the cost savings paying for file space, as well as making people’s jobs easier and more productive.” Full story »

Credential Securities, Inc., employs more than 2,000 staff and representatives who provide integrated wealth management solutions and services to Canadian credit unions, with over $10.8 billion in assets under management. But helping clients achieve their financial goals came with a price—overstuffed file cabinets, difficulty locating information and the stress of complying with regulatory requirements. Full story »

When we last heard from Joseph Salpietro, President and CEO of Xpyria Investment Advisors, he was looking forward to implementing Workflow to streamline his Firm’s repetitive work processes. As one of the first Avante customers in the financial services industry, one of the reasons Salpietro chose Avante was because of its built-in business process management (BPM) functionality.

“A lot of people think if you have an office in a metropolitan city that the highest cost to a business is rent, it’s not. It’s the people we employ. So I’d rather have them doing mission-critical, profitable work.”
Full story »

Transamerica Financial Advisors, Inc. (TFA), an indirect subsidiary of AEGON N.V., provides investments and financial planning to clients nationwide. With a network of more than 700 registered representatives, 42 offices of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) branches and 51 home office staff, TFA is a rapidly growing enterprise whose independent representatives faced the growing cost of paper-based processes: misplaced documents, time-consuming manual workflows, express-mail costs and file storage expenses.
Full story »

“Our decision to go paperless was driven not by cost or budget issues, but by the desire to grow our business, tame a paper monster that was consuming every available square foot of office space, improve our customer service, and keep up with a rapidly-changing financial planning industry,” says Blake Woodard, Managing Partner of Woodard Insurance, LLP, a Fort Worth-based firm of financial advisors and insurance professionals.

“In our view, we had no choice as to whether to go paperless. You must go paperless if you want to survive and thrive in the financial planning industry,” he adds. Full story »

“Personally, I think that every financial advisor has to move eventually to an electronic filing system. It’s not a matter of if, but when,” says Nick Cosentino, president and founder of Financial Foundations, Inc. “In my opinion, it would be impossible to succeed without it.”

Full story »

“If financial advisors aren’t talking to people, they’re not making money,” says Paul Murphy, National Sales Director at Spire Investment Partners, LLC. Murphy’s problem was that his top earners were spending too much time staying on top of the paperwork that comes with handling over $1 billion in client assets, which he expects to at least double this year. “It’s the regulators. It’s the auditors. The paper starts to pile up from the first client meeting and all the way through the process,” he says.

For Murphy, his previous experience integrating two large broker-dealers had shown how the right technology ultimately leads to success. “If you want to succeed in this business, you’ve got to get great technology,” he says. “Using technology not only defensively, but offensively, is very near and dear to my heart.”
Full story »

The Challenge

The strict oversight of the Isle of Man Government’s Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) means that independent financial advisers require a secure, enterprise-wide platform for tracking and managing both paper and electronic records. Proliferating work process documents, extensive audits and strict records-retention rules leave many financial services firms struggling to maintain productivity in a highly-competitive industry.

For Jon McGowan, managing director of MAC Financial, these challenges multiplied with his business’s increasing success. With three major acquisitions in three years, McGowan and his staff were dealing with more customers, more work and significantly more paper. They needed a solution that would not only organize their records, but would also assist them in following compliance directives. Whatever solution they chose had to have enterprise capabilities, be able to manage a large volume of documents and integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable fast, efficient and flexible client service.

It took less than half a day for MAC Financial to implement a Laserfiche solution, enabling instant document retrieval and freeing up an entire floor of office space. Now, MAC Financial runs more efficiently, saving time, money and staff resources while increasing revenue.
Full story »

“We were an early adopter of many technologies, but not document management,” admits Alan Levitz, President and CEO of GCG Financial, Inc. “It was hard for me to envision it working effectively, because I was concerned about flexibility and searchability.”

Levitz’s father, Robert, founded GCG Financial, then called the Greater Chicago Group, Inc. in 1975. Alan joined in 1983, and his brothers David and Rick soon followed. Alan’s now president and CEO; David and Rick are both executive vice presidents. But GCG is hardly a small family operation—the firm manages 83 producers who sell insurance, investment and benefits, most of them split between Bannockburn, and Oakbrook IL, and Denver, CO. “As our offices don’t share the same physical location, it was important to standardize the services we provide to both groups,” says Levitz.
Full story »

Many financial advisors consider technology an expense, no matter how necessary. Joseph Salpietro of Xpyria Investment Advisors felt the same way, until he came to a crucial realization.

“We always figured we’d have to hire more people to create the efficiency we needed,” he says. “We’d talked about needing two or three administrators over the next five or so years at a cost of, say, $30,000-40,000 each. And when we found out that we didn’t have to hire those people to help us with the paper chase—well, that’s a smart business decision.”

Full story »

With the strict oversight of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), independent financial advisers in the UK require a robust platform for tracking and managing paper records. Rigorous audits and record-retention rules, along with numerous work-process documents, leave independent financial advisors drowning in a sea of paper.

Regal Independent Financial Services Director Neil James and his co-directors were fighting a losing battle against rapidly-filling file cabinets and spiraling storage costs, all the while facing the strict compliance and retention pressures of operating in a highly-regulated environment. With files of up to 250 pages, easy searching was a priority, and physical storage space was at a premium.
Full story »