The last mile of retirement is a spending problem
A new IRIC white paper makes the case for building spending permission into the plan, rather than hoping clients find it on their own.
August 18
The Practice Desk 25 stories this week · 219 total
The Labor Department's lost-and-found database locates forgotten retirement plans
The SECURE 2.0 search tool gives advisors a fresh annual-review ritual — just don't mistake a match for a payout.
Finra proposes a ten-day pause on suspicious account moves
Brokerages would gain a ten-day window to stop fraud. Advisors would need to explain the pause to a client.
FINRA proposes fresh list when arbitrator selections fail
A rule filing would replace random substitutions with a new list when the first round of arbitrator picks falls short.
Your website is the source ChatGPT cites most
Advisor-controlled pages account for 45% of ChatGPT's citations when it recommends an advisor, according to a new study.
Retire SMART's $800M book: 25% of revenue into marketing
An Omaha RIA built its book organically by treating educational marketing as a line item.
Vibe-coded tools are building on top of the advisor stack
A new Nerd's Eye View analysis finds that most advisor-built AI tools are supplements to existing platforms, not substitutes — and the build-versus-buy math has shifted less than the hype implies.
A three-person team runs $240 million on a meeting agenda
A two-sided meeting agenda, refined over 20 years, is the system behind a $240 million practice.
Most of the $124 trillion transfer lands with women
Seventy percent of women have never met an advisor; the first meeting is where the transfer's largest client block will be won.
YCharts folds Zephyr SMA data into proposals; Advyzon ships AI suite
Two upgrades inside existing platforms push RIAs to test built-in features against the tools they already run.
FINNY prices marketing on a share of the assets it wins
A $50 monthly platform fee plus a 20-basis-point asset charge makes marketing a recurring cost of growth.
Edward Jones's $5,000 digital pilot takes aim at the next generation
A salaried remote advisor and a 0.65% fee give the 20,500-broker firm a product for clients too small for a branch relationship.
RIAs push trust and estate in-house despite a thin advisor bench
The services are moving in-house faster than the advisor expertise to staff them, survey data suggest.
A new directory catalogs nearly 50 AI agents for advisors
The directory lists individual agents, so advisors can compare the tools buried behind vendor jargon.
Bloomberg's Canoe deal puts alts document automation in the advisor spotlight
RIAs and family offices now have a stake in how accurately AI reads alts documents — and in the humans who check the output.
AI note takers belong in the coaching workflow, ActiFi CEO says
Spenser Segal argues meeting-capture software should feed advisor coaching, not just compliance files, and prescribes a five-question test for real AI strategy.
Anthropic's auto mode previews the next test for AI governance
The approval-fatigue data behind Claude Code's auto mode show how RIAs will control automated client interactions.
Usage-based AI clauses are silently raising your next renewal
Wealthtech contracts are passing AI compute costs through to advisory firms, and the meter turns whether or not anyone uses the feature.
RMD season is the true test of an AI prompt
The latest AI Prompt Lab installment makes the case that seasonal batch emails need a fixed skeleton, per-client variables, and a compliance rail.