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. Full story »

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. Full story »

Brent Burns and Stephen Huxley founded Asset Dedication, LLC in 2002 with an innovative notion: that the liability-driven investment portfolios common in the institutional world could be engineered for individuals according to their specific income needs, akin to a personalized pension fund. In 2009, advancements in processor technology, coupled with the support of BondDesk Group, LLC, gave the Mill Valley, CA-based firm the opportunity to transition from consultants into a full-service sub-advisor offering individualized portfolio management to RIAs.

Key to this transition, Burns believed, was leveraging business technology to minimize both the operational and risk management costs of working directly with advisors. “As a growing company, technology was the way to get more done with a smaller headcount,” he says.
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For Spire Investment Partners, LLC, a combination broker/dealer, registered investment advisor, and insurance agency based in McLean, VA, managing several billion dollars in assets and answering to multiple regulatory agencies—including FINRA, the SEC and state insurance regulators—brings with it the need for especially agile enterprise content management (ECM). Full story »

Keane Capital Management, Inc. is a hedge fund firm based in Charlotte, NC. Since its founding in 1999 with a staff of just two, the firm has grown to seven full-time employees handling fund portfolios for some 250 high net worth investors. With this growth came the need for greater administrative efficiency, which led to Ted Slack joining the firm as its first controller in 2005. Full story »

When Olmsted & Associates, a CPA firm based in Fountain Valley, CA, went looking for a content management system in 2006, its needs were simple: “We needed a program that would allow us to scan multiple sizes and types of documents and then facilitate our search for them later. Security and retention periods were a concern as well,” says Tax Administrator Fernando Rocha. “Basically, we needed to have everything in one place so whomever needed to use it, could.”
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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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Nara Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nara Bancorp, Inc. (Nasdaq: NARA), was founded in 1989 to serve the Korean-American business community in Southern California. Since its inception, the bank has grown to encompass 20 branches across three states, 350 employees and assets of more than $2 billion.

As a large community bank and federally-insured financial institution, Nara gets audited “all the time,” says IT Manager Mona Chui. “Keeping information secure and confidential is a top priority for us.”
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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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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 »