2016 monitor awards gold winners: advisor
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Advisor Monitor2016 Gold Medal Winners
Corporate Insight provides competitive intelligence, consulting and user experience research to the nation'sleading financial, health and education institutions. For more than two decades, the firm has tracked technologicaldevelopments in the end-user online experience, identifying best practices in online financial services andinvesting, mobile finance, social media and other emerging areas. Corporate Insight offers subscription-basedMonitor services in 14 verticals, including banking, healthcare and alumni relations, along with custom research,digital capabilities audits, special studies, user research and other consulting services. The firm helps its clients—including 70% of the financial services firms in the Fortune 500—to remain at the forefront of industry trends andimprove their competitive position.
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Corporate Insight is proud to unveil our fifteenth annual Mutual Fund Monitor – Advisor Awards, offering a broadbenchmarking of the advisor websites across six key categories: Advisor Homepages, Literature Order Systems,Practice Management Resources, Multimedia, Commentaries & Thought Leadership and New or Improved Tools.
As in past years, we assign the Gold Medal to firms that present exceptional offerings within given categories. Weaward a Silver Medal for firms that offer similar value but lack some of the outstanding attributes and functions ofthe best offerings. We give the Bronze Medal to firms that offer a unique or noteworthy iteration but do not meetour highest standards for a given category. Changes to rankings and awarded medals from previous iterations ofthe same category were predominantly influenced by this year’s site revamps. Additionally, adjustments were madeto grading criteria weights in order to reflect current industry best practices. This year, Vanguard was added to ourlineup of coverage group firms, which also impacted grading and rankings across all categories.
Advisor Monitor Awards
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Category Overview
Promote Your Firm’s 2016 Monitor Awards!Corporate Insight is happy to assist all award-winning firms in promoting their honors. For more
information and for examples of past promotions, contact us at [email protected].
Advisor Homepages
Literature Order Systems
Practice ManagementResources
Multimedia
Commentaries & Thought Leadership
New orImproved Tools
Medal Chart
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Advisor homepages are a portal to main site areas and a key space to promote funds, services and commentary.This category evaluates the different ways firms promote their content as well as how homepages are designedand organized. Promotions for products and commentary were critical grading points. More favorable grades wereassigned to advisor homepages with customizable sections, such as watch lists or favorite document capabilities.Personalization of homepage content, including targeted commentary and the availability of wholesaler contactinformation, also beneficially impacted firms’ rankings.
Advisor Homepages
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Fidelity retains its gold medal for the advisorhomepage. The well-designed page employsresponsive design and includes a customizablewatchlist and favorite documents section. In additionto customizable sections for tracking favorite productsand files, the firm uses personalization to suggesttargeted content to the end user, creating a moretailored experience than any other coverage groupfirm.
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Literature Order Systems
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This category highlights best practices for the document-ordering experience provided through each firm’sliterature center. Efficient literature centers provide advisors with ample client-ready materials, brochures, forms,PDFs and fund documents. For comparative grading within this category, we examined the ease of access, depth ofitem descriptions available for ordering, availability of browse and search capabilities, shopping cart technology andorder tracking options. We favor firms with features like prominently viewable carts, detailed documentdescriptions, dynamic navigation controls with powerful search options and useful filters to pare down results.
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Franklin Templeton maintains a long-standing positionin the gold slot for its literature center. Noteworthyfeatures that have kept the literature center in the topspot include its ease of findabilty, a generous selectionof filter and search options, detailed item descriptionsand a user-friendly, prominent shopping cart. The firmis one of few to offer a search bar with a predictivesearch capability in its literature center.
Practice Management Resources
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This category benchmarks the materials that firms provide to help advisors build their business, nurture clientrelationships and manage daily operations. This ranges from tips on prospecting to advice on how to leveragetechnology. We evaluate several aspects of practice management resources, including presentation andorganization, the types of content available and the breadth of topics covered. We favored firms that offerresources on pressing issues impacting the advisory space, such as the Department of Labor’s fiduciary ruling orheir retention.
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Hartford Funds retains the gold medal for its practicemanagement resources. This year, the firm revampedthe layout and presentation of its PracticeManagement section and added four new topics to itslineup. A key strength in this category is the wide rangeof formats, which includes audio clips, videos, webinarreplays, white papers, worksheets and workbooks,slide decks and how-to guides.
Multimedia
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This category explores how firms use multimedia to enhance the advisor experience. Our review assessed theavailability and quality of audio and video resources. We also explored the quality of webinars and the presentationof replays. Medal winners did not necessarily need to be strong in all three formats of multimedia. Attributes suchas location, presentation and design, scope and relevancy of topics were most important in the grading process.
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Fidelity earns the gold medal for its multimediaresources, which include a robust video center and aselection of timely conference calls and webinars.Within this category, Fidelity is strongest in terms of itsvideo content. Around one to four new clips areuploaded each week. All new multimedia resources areprominently promoted on the homepage upon theirrelease.
Commentaries & Thought Leadership
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Commentaries and thought leadership help advisors interpret how events impact different asset classes. Fundfirms can achieve true differentiation from their competitors by providing advisors with information that they canuse toward making informed decisions for their clients. This category assesses the resources firms offer to helpkeep advisors in tune with critical market and economic events. These resources are ideally released on aconsistent schedule and cover the most relevant topics to the investing landscape.
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J.P. Morgan earns the gold for its range of commentaryand thought leadership materials. The firm’s revamp inFebruary improved the organizational structure ofcommentary and thought leadership resources. Thefirm offers several recurring series that provideadvisors with a persistent stream of information tokeep them informed. Resources in this category comein a wide variety of formats, including HTML articles,slide decks, PDFs, videos and audio.
New or Improved Tools
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This category evaluates all tools or calculators that were released or significantly enhanced since our last awardsreport. We considered every tool across all financial planning purposes (e.g., portfolio construction, markettracking, comparing investments). Usefulness to advisors in their day-to-day practice and quality of results were themost critical factors in gaining a medal. Tools that let advisors create customized, client-ready reports receivedadditional points.
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The American Funds Target Date ProView tool earnsthis year’s gold medal. The retirement-focused tool ismarketed as a source for advisors seeking to keep inline with compliance standards. The tool lets advisorscompare and contrast up to four different target datefunds at a time from both in-house and selectcompetitor fund families. Advisors can also generate acustomized, client-approved PDF report of their results.
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Senior Analyst
Advisor Monitor and Mutual Fund Monitor
646-929-5158
Erika Fazekas
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