Bank Investment Consultant articles from June 2008

Bank Investment Consultant archives from June 2008

Winning Ways.
June 1, 2008... This month's cover story ("BIC Top 20 Program Managers," page 14) is a ranking of who we consider to be the best investment program managers in the industry right now, based on the nominations we received from their sponsoring institutions....

Community Bank Near $500m in AUM.
June 1, 2008... Investment programs at community banks (those under $4 billion in assets) earned nearly $500 million in revenue in 2007, according to the Michael White-LPL Financial Institution Services Report: Community Bank Investment Programs, which tallied...

Healthcare Fuels Anxiety.
June 1, 2008... The percentage of workers who are very confident in their retirement prospects fell sharply from 27% in 2007 to just 18% in 2008, according to a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Retirees are similarly gloomy. Those...

Dire Market Predictions Abound.
June 1, 2008... Advisor confidence in the economy and stock market improved in April but not by much, according to the Rydex AdvisorBenchmarking Advisor Confidence Index. The index, which gauges advisors' views on the market, rose 4%, to 90.37, from the...

Can Banks Win the 401(k) Lottery?
June 1, 2008... Total 401(k) plan assets grew 12% to $2.9 trillion last year, and Simple, SEP and Solo 401(k) plans saw double-digit growth, reaching $300 billion in assets, according to a study by the Society of Professional Asset Managers and Record Keepers,...

MetLife Adds Social Security Calculator.
June 1, 2008... MetLife has a new tool to help people approaching retirement decide when to begin taking Social Security benefits. The MetLife Social Security Decision Tool "is the first online tool to combine life expectancy tables with a Social Security...

BIC Top 20 Program Managers: Bank Investment Consultant is proud to announce the winners of our inaugural BIC Top 20 Program Managers competition.(Company overview)
June 1, 2008... Banks of all sizes and from all over the country were invited in March to submit their program managers for consideration. As you can see, we gathered a great deal of information on these managers programs, but the ranking itself is simply...

A Better Option: How James Abbott and his partner Marvin Thomson use put and call trades to turbocharge their fee business.
June 1, 2008... Of Invest's 1,490 advisors, only12 serveon the third-party marker's fee advisory board, a sort of special-ops team for recurring revenue business. Surprisingly, two of them, James Abbott and Marvin Thomson, hail from the same tiny town,...

Quality Touch: Recreational rather than educational events can mean a lot more to your clients.
June 1, 2008... If you believe in the 80:20 rule - that is, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients-here's an interesting fact: An A client (one of the 20% that is delivering the 80%) is worth 16 times your average B or C client. That's a...

Why Contact is critical.
June 1, 2008... * The average bank advisor does repeat business with only 17% to 21% of their book, compared with 45% to 55% for the average wirehouse advisor and 68% to 73% for the average independent advisor. (Source: McLagan, a company that complies...

Courting The Media: Establishing yourself as a financial expert in the local media can make your business worth talking about.
June 1, 2008... Patricia Hinds, a personal wealth manager with St. Paul, Minn.-based financial advisory firm Granite Financial and an affiliate with EverBank Advisor Services, remembers the day her phone rang and a voice said, "I saw your quote in Kiplinger's...

Home Equity: Why a reverse mortgage should be your clients' loan of last resort.
June 1, 2008... Most American homeowners spend 20 to 30 years paying off a mortgage, hoping to be free-and-clear holders of titles to their residence at retirement age. But for a growing number of people who are hitting their golden years without much gold in...

Plan Your Own Retirement: With prior planning, advisors can profit from their practices when they want to retire.
June 1, 2008... Unlike the owner of a brick-and-mortar business, a financial advisor's greatest asset is not real estate, equipment and inventory. The value the advisor has accumulated rests in his or her largely intangible book of business, put together over...

A Fair Fight?: Credit unions scramble for survival as regulators attempt to throw them in with banks.
June 1, 2008... A funny thing happened on the way to bank regulatory reform-they decided to try to kill off credit unions. The subprime crisis and failure of the bank regulators' systems to stem the bleeding have sent the Treasury Department, Federal...

Midwest Motivation.
June 1, 2008... BIC: What are the new and unique opportunities in your territory? Breslin: The bank just hired an outside sales consultant, FTC Methods, and as a result of that training, we formed mastermind groups in all six regions, consisting of trust,...