When writer Gertrude Stein said that “a rose is a rose is a rose,” she meant that things are what they are.

But sometimes that’s just plain untrue, as in the case of technology companies marketing client portals to advisors.

Many tech vendors serving advisors are marketing client-facing pages and calling them client portals, but they are using the term all too loosely. Portals are supposed present information from a variety of sources on a unified site. Search engine companies created the first portals by presenting email, news, stock prices, as well as search engine access, on a single page. 

When a portfolio reporting application displays performance data on a page for an advisor’s client and calls it a client portal, that’s hard to swallow. Even if the portfolio software vendor brings in some data from an account aggregation system, calling the site a client portal gives a bad name to portals.

At Advisor Products, we’ve been offering our Personal Client Portals platform for a year now, and what we have is truly a portal. We are bringing in data from dozens of sources, including a long list of professional applications, including:

·         Advisor Exchange

·         Albridge Solutions

·         AssetBook

·         Black Diamond Reporting

·         FinanceLogix

·         Laser App

·         Money Tree

·         MoneyGuide Pro

·         Orion Advisor Services

·         PortfolioCenter

·         XLR8

At Advisor Products, we are actively developing interfaces that will allow us to display data from By All Accounts and EZ-Data Smart Office, and discussion with several other firms is under way.

Moreover, our client portals bring in RSS feeds from hundreds of websites. Feeds about health, sports, technology, science, weather, and much more are all ported in and personalized to each client’s personal interests--plus we bring in RSS feeds from personal finance websites.

In addition, our portals contain content that we produce about personal finance and that is also personalized to each client’s interests. Advisors can securely store clients' personal files in an online vault that is integrated with our portals. They can use the blog to communicate with clients, and they can assign or receive tasks in the To-Do Manager. Outside professionals, such as an estate planning attorney or tax accountant, can also be permissioned to assign and receive to dos. And feeds of market indexes, stock prices, and useful calculators are also provided as resources to clients.

Our client portal is truly a portal because we are totally focused on creating the best client portal you can get. We are not making CRM software. We are not making portfolio accounting software or a financial planning application. We want to do one thing great: make the most flexible, complete, and fully integrated client portal system offered to advisors.

So be skeptical when firms that make other applications tell you they have a client portal. While it is possible that a planning application or CRM system might create a cleint facing application, it is unlikely to truly be a client portal.

Some roses are not roses at all, but are every bit as thorny. Don’t get stuck.