Asset Allocation Ranges

Other Improvements in the Asset Allocation Area

• Asset Class Groups
  • Add new asset class groups
  • Group labels may be changed
  • Colors of asset class groups may be changed to reflect display within the pie chart
  • Asset classes may be moved to different groups
• You may override the calculated historical return or standard deviation for an asset allocation model even if no custom asset classes are used

Improved list of existing IPSs

• You can quickly identify the IPSs that are standard vs professional

Template Management Improvements

• You hand-pick the templates to which you wish to apply (sync to) a particular paragraph
• Header/Footer customization was added to standard templates as well

New Verbiage Available For Your Review and Import To Your Current Templates

• Executive Summary
  • Removed duplicate “Asset Allocation” title
  • Adjusted expected return tokens in Profit Sharing template
• “Asset Classes to be included” under “Diversification and Investment Constraints”
  • Added space
• “Plan Fiduciary Bond Information” -> “Overview”
  • Updated verbiage for Self Directed 401(K) plan, Pension Plan, and Profit Sharing templates
• “Investment Monitoring and Control Procedures” -> “Reports”
• Updated template sections to accommodate the new asset allocation ranges functionality
  • “Asset Allocation” -> “Portfolio Allocation, Statistics & Rebalancing – With Statistics”
  • “Asset Allocation” -> “Portfolio Allocation, Statistics & Rebalancing – Without Statistics”
  • “Asset Allocation” -> “Portfolio Allocation, Statistics & Rebalancing (Projected Returns)”
  • “Asset Allocation” -> “Portfolio Allocation, Statistics & Rebalancing (Historical Returns)”
  • “Asset Allocation” -> “Portfolio Allocation, Statistics & Rebalancing – Updated Allocations”

The new features include

• Compare a paragraph of your template to the latest version in the default IPS AdvisorPro® template
• Add a paragraph to all your IPSs
• Remove a paragraph from all your IPSs
• Restore an IPS to its original verbiage as configured by template
• Add new or pre-existing paragraph to an IPS

For instructions on how to use this functionality please refer to our HELP MANUAL. Additionally, please take a few moments to view the video below that will provide a visual illustration of the new functionalities. For better visibility, you can click “Full Screen” in the video player. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact our Help Desk at support@IPSAdvisorPro.com.

As always we thank you for your continued support of IPS AdvisorPro® and would like to remind you that we appreciate and value your feedback. If you would like to provide feedback and/or suggestions regarding this improvement or others you are interested in then please contact us at support@IPSAdvisorPro.com.

We wish you a Happy and Healthy holiday season!

The IPS AdvisorPro® Team

Miami, FL and Overland Park, KS – August 26, 2009. VSR Financial Services, Inc. announced today the selection of IPS AdvisorPro^® to provide their over 200 financial advisors with advanced investment planning tools for developing Investment Policy Statements (IPS). 

Click here to download a PDF version of this Press Release.

“The use of IPSs has become more than just a “best practice” in the industry,” said co-founders Norm Boone, MBA, CFP^® and Linda Lubitz-Boone, CFP^®.  “In today’s environment, disclosure and transparency are becoming increasingly important and the IPS becomes the go to document and record of the agreements between advisor and client about how their money will be invested.”

As part of the arrangement, financial advisors affiliated with VSR will have access to preferred pricing, education and training on customizing and using comprehensive IPSs in their practice.

“We’re very excited to be able to enhance our offering to our financial advisors and their clients through the online technology of IPS AdvisorPro®,” said Chatten Scruggs, SVP Technology, of VSR Financial Services, Inc.  “We take a long term, thoughtful approach to providing financial services and the use of IPSs is a critical aspect of that delivery.  We look forward to streamlining that process and making it an easy step for our advisors through IPS AdvisorPro®.”

About VSR Financial Services, Inc.

VSR Financial Services is a full-service securities broker/dealer founded in 1985.  VSR’s focus is on the long-term strategies and products designed to change visions into reality.  By design, VSR is a small firm providing individualized service and support.  VSR is not transaction-oriented and offers no proprietary products.  The highest priority is building and maintaining long-term relationships.  Through a network of more than 250 representatives, VSR represents over 80,000 client accounts throughout North America and has invested annually some $5 billion on their behalf.

About IPS AdvisorPro®

Created by financial advisors for financial advisors, IPS AdvisorPro^® is designed to work with all types of wealth management professionals and their practices.  IPS AdvisorPro^® offers a flexible solution to creating and managing Investment Policy Statements that are easy to use through an encrypted, secure web-based environment.  With over 1,000 users and 17,000 IPSs created, IPS AdvisorPro^® is the industry’s leading technology solution.  IPS AdvisorPro^® was named in 2006 by Morningstar as the “Software of the Year” and was a CPA Wealth Provider “Financial Planning Awards Winner” in 2009.  For more information, please visit www.IPSAdvisorPro.com

For More Information, please contact:

IPS AdvisorPro^®: Linda Groden, 330-724-7145, lindag@ipsadvisorpro.com

VSR Financial Services, Inc.:  Kevin Johannesen, 913-234-8331, kjohannesen@vsrfs.com

By one estimate, it can take the typical financial adviser 155 minutes to create an investment policy statement from scratch using a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word.

To refresh your memory, an IPS is a written document agreed to by both an adviser and client that outlines goals, policies and procedures to be used by the adviser for managing investments.

Such statements are required these days where a fiduciary relationship exists.

The above estimate is by Norm Boone, president of San Francisco-based Mosaic Financial Partners Inc. and co-creator of the popular IPS AdvisorPro® software and online application from BLIPS Partners LLC in Miami.

While the white paper is clearly meant to urge advisers to buy the firm’s software, the estimates included in the white paper, “Investment Policy Statements: The Technology Return on Investment for Financial Advisors,” seem reasonable and should be of interest to advisers in terms of comparing their current procedures and the time involved in preparation of policy statements. 

For example, Mr. Boone breaks down the production of a statement using manual means into the following chunks: filling out the client questionnaire and organizing client data, 15 minutes; finding and inserting asset allocation models, 15 minutes; selection of benchmarks, 15 minutes; customizing the IPS for specific client requests, 30 minutes; entering client recommendations and proofreading the entire document, 60 minutes; and compliance review, 20 minutes.

Grand total, as mentioned above, is 155 minutes.

Mr. Boone claims that the same tasks performed on IPS AdvisorPro® would be 57 minutes.

In addition to the time breakdown, the article also has cost estimates for creating and updating statements manually versus using an online tool.

For example, Mr. Boone estimates that a 50-client firm will spend $22,500 in policy statement creation using a manual process, while a 250-client firm will spend $112,500.

He estimates a cost savings from $16,300 to $81,500 if advisers use an online solution instead.

For more information on the software, visit IPS AdvisorPro® online.

Firefox reaches a billion downloads

Since it was introduced in November 2004, Firefox web browser software has had over billion downloads of That milestone was reached last night, as tracked by the download counter at the spreadfirefox.com site.

The browser was created and is maintained by the Mozilla Foundation based in Mountain View, Calif. with the help of thousands of volunteers.

The browser remains Redmond Wash.-based Microsoft Corp.’s top competitor despite entries by the Safari browser from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. and the Chrome browser from Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

The choice of web browsers is going to continue to be of interest to advisers as a significant percentage are now favoring applications hosted on the Internet. In a technology survey conducted by InvestmentNews last June, 24% of respondents preferred web-based applications, edging out the 23% who favored desktop or self-hosted applications.

Meanwhile 40% of advisers were in favor of a combination of both.

For more information visit the Mozilla blog and Spread Firefox website.

Executive Summary

The financial services industry is undergoing rapid change due to recent financial crises on Wall Street and the impacts of a prolonged recession.  Market volatility has increased, creating uncertainty and angst in investors’ minds.  The demand for transparency has increased, as have the expectations for better “prudent practices.”  As a result, there has been a renewed focus for investment planning by financial advisors and the use of the time-tested approach of Investment Policy Statements (IPS).

Considered a “best practice” in modern wealth management, documenting advisor-client agreements in an IPS provides a systematic discipline for decision-making, bringing transparency, clarity and shared understanding to the advisor-investor relationship, helping to build an increased level of trust.

Many financial advisors are using word processing software solutions combined with manual processes to perform the related tasks of creating, updating and maintaining IPSs and the resulting inefficiencies cause higher costs and lack of controls, which result in declining profitability.

Industry experts all agree that the best solution is to adopt technology to increase efficiency, streamline operations and enable rapid response to market changes.  New advances and innovations in technology specifically designed for financial advisors to provide web-based investment planning tools for creating Investment Policy Statements that allow advisors to meet these challenges head on and provide a substantial return on investment (ROI) is now available.

“If we tried to create our own Word document, the problem we see is that it would be extremely difficult to maintain consistency, what with re-entering and re-casting the allocations for hundreds of clients.  By using the templates in IPS AdvisorPro^® we know that we are achieving a big time savings and ROI.”

David Strege, CFP^®, CFA^®, Co-Founder and Senior Wealth Coach, Syverson Strege & Company

Download a PDF version of this White Paper here.

By having an online platform that is flexible, dynamic and easy to use, advisory firms can lower the costs arising from the writing of IPSs by tens of thousands of dollars on an annual basis.  The bottom line result is that not only do advisors realize substantial cost savings, they are also empowered with a very robust investment planning capability that frees them up to pursue growth opportunities and reallocate staff resources to revenue generating and client-facing activities.

Table 1.0 – Annual Savings from Web-Based Investment Planning System vs. Traditional Word Processing Systems

Return On Investment Opportunities

An in-depth study into the operational costs associated with the investment planning process for creating, updating and maintaining Investment Policy Statements (IPS) has revealed opportunities for cost savings and a significant ROI for technology solutions.  These include the operational tasks for:

• IPS Creation
• IPS Client Updates
• IPS Firm Updates

“From just a time stand point, it typically only takes about 1 hour to complete a detailed and comprehensive IPS with IPS AdvisorPro^® vs. the 5 or 6 hours it normally would take if we did it on our own and it wouldn’t be nearly as comprehensive.”

Eric Golberg, CFP^®, Vice President of Private Wealth Services, Bellatore, LLC

IPS Creation

The typical process for creating an IPS for a client involves multiple manual steps using word processing software, such as Microsoft Word.  These include:

• Filling out client related data intake questionnaires
• Organizing client data for IPS creation
• Entering in client data and recommendations
• Finding and inserting the appropriate Asset Allocation models
• Selecting benchmarks
• Customizing/Revising the IPS based on client requests
• Proof reading the entire document to ensure accuracies and fixing typos
• Compliance review
• Save / print to client files

When IPSs are created with word processing software, this manual process can take several hours to complete, creating many opportunities for errors and inconsistencies across multiple advisors in the firm or from one client to the next.

Other problems arising from using word processing software to create an Investment Policy Statement include the potential to skip over asking all questions pertinent to the IPS as well as the fact that word processing templates can easily and are often mistakenly over-written, resulting in the original intended wording lost forever.  Other areas of concern are that there are no “checkpoints” in a word processing template to make sure that each place in the document that needs to be examined are addressed.  As a result, some areas can be overlooked and the final document may contain sections that are not appropriate or even places where the wrong clients’ names or information are used.  Because of these potential areas for mistakes, each word-processed IPS must be carefully reviewed, increasing the total amount of time for the overall process.

Contrast this software / manual process with an online investment planning tool with consistent templates and information that is auto-populated into the document or is just a click away, as well as being stored in a secure system, and many of these tasks and staff time are reduced dramatically, with a much higher accuracy rate.  Incorporating compliance-approved language and disclosure information, pre-programmed into the system, shortens and streamlines the compliance review process and ensures consistency across the firm.

For many advisory firms, creating IPSs can only be done by the advisor since many of the tasks are customized to the client situation and are very difficult to delegate to lower cost employees.  At a conservative rate of $75 per hour[1], the cost savings for firms is substantial, ranging from $6,000 to upwards of $30,000 per year, depending on the size of the firm (Table 2.0).

Table 2.0 – IPS Creation Costs

[1] Source:  Industry compensation benchmarking surveys reflect advisor compensation is ~$150,000 per year, divided by a 2000 hour work year equals $75 per hour.

IPS Client Updates

Once a client’s Investment Policy Statement has been created, it should be regularly updated as part of the quarterly or annual review process.  Clients’ needs, situations, account values and objectives change frequently, requiring firms to periodically update their financial and investment planning documents.

As part of this process, there are again many manual steps required for firms using word processing software.  These include:

• Updating client contact data
• Updating account values
• Updating description of client circumstances
• Updating Investment objectives
• Updating asset allocation
• Updating investment constraints/restrictions
• Proof reading the entire document to ensure accuracies and fixing typos
• Compliance review
• Save / print to client files

Contrast this software / manual process with an online investment planning tool with the ability to access the stored IPS from anywhere and update with information that is just a click away or can be downloaded from other programs such as CRM and financial planning tools, and many of these tasks and staff time are reduced dramatically, with a much higher accuracy rate.

At a conservative rate of $75 per hour, the cost savings for firms is substantial, ranging from $4,000 to upwards of $20,000 per year depending on the size of the firm (Table 3.0).

Table 3.0 – IPS Client Update Costs

“The standard process and the flexible templates in IPS AdvisorPro^® allow us to create one format and approach for generating consistent documents from each advisor for every client with the appropriate disclosure language and our pre-determined asset allocation models.  Without that, our compliance and supervisory requirements would grow exponentially if we had everyone using their own approach, wording and content.”

Jim Arnold, Senior Vice President and Investment Group Manager, Monroe Bank and Trust

IPS Firm Updates

In these current volatile markets, investment strategies, asset classes and overall asset allocation models are constantly being reviewed, changed and implemented as part of the firm’s approach to managing client portfolios.  These firm-level changes then need to be manually applied to each and every client situation since they cannot be globally broadcast through word processing software to include the corresponding updates to client investment and financial planning documents.  These required manual steps include:

• Modifying asset classes to be included in the client’s asset allocation model
• Updating the percentages of each included asset class within each asset allocation model
• Selecting the appropriate asset allocation model for each IPS
• Updating the various descriptions for the firm’s philosophy and approach to managing portfolios

Contrast this software / manual process with an online investment planning tool with the ability to simply use a “check box” approach to modify asset allocation models and percentages along with the ability to change descriptions in one place that are then automatically, globally carried through to all client IPSs, and many of these tasks and staff time are reduced dramatically, with a much higher accuracy rate.  This ability to quickly update client documents based on changes in the investment approach provides firms a great deal of flexibility to respond to the market environment, be consistent throughout the firm as the changes are implemented and provide a much higher level of service.

At a conservative rate of $75 per hour, the percentage cost reduction is substantial (90%) as well as the overall dollar costs, ranging from nearly $6,000 to $30,000 per year depending on the size of the firm (Table 4.0).

Table 4.0 – IPS Firm Update Costs

“IPS AdvisorPro^® with its flexible technology allows us to truly customize the IPS by importing our detailed, complex and innovative asset classification methodology into the IPS.   Additionally, through its online platform, we are able to provide a consistent approach across our 150 employees and 7 offices nationwide, all the while controlling the process.”

Steve Braverman, President, Harris myCFO

Conclusion

While every advisory business is different and actual dollar and time savings will vary from firm to firm, it is clear that a web-based, secure, and flexible investment planning tool for creating IPSs can deliver a significant return on investment as compared to writing and updating an equal number of Investment Policy Statements using word processing software.

Financial advisors owe it to their clients, their firms, their staff and themselves to explore how new technology solutions can streamline their back-office, provide scalability, enhance service to their clients and ultimately improve profits and the ability to grow.

While many advisory firms have enjoyed success with their current approaches, in today’s volatile markets, leading advisory firms are taking the initiative to adopt new technology to stay ahead of the curve.  The opportunity for success has never been greater: higher revenues, increased efficiency, lower business risk, all you have to do is take the easy steps necessary to make them a reality for your firm.

Appendix – Methodology

*Hourly cost is determined by using industry compensation benchmarking studies for advisors, which is ~$150,000 per year divided by a 2000-hour work year, which equates to $75 per hour.

About IPS AdvisorPro^®

Created by financial advisors for financial advisors, IPS AdvisorPro^® is designed to work with all types of wealth management professionals and their practices.  IPS AdvisorPro^® offers a flexible solution to creating and managing Investment Policy Statements that are easy to use through an encrypted, secure web-based environment.  With over 1,000 users and 17,000 IPSs created, IPS AdvisorPro^® is the industry’s leading technology solution.  IPS AdvisorPro^® was named in 2006 by Morningstar as the “Software of the Year” and was a CPA Wealth Provider “Financial Planning Awards Winner” in 2009.  For more information, please visit www.IPSAdvisorPro.com.

Click here to read the InvestmentNews review of this white paper (by Davis Janowski, Technology Reporter, 7-31-09).

]]> http://www.ipsadvisorpro.com/investment-policy-statement-blog/2009/07/1028/feed/ 0 http://www.ipsadvisorpro.com/investment-policy-statement-blog/2009/06/ips-advisorpro%c2%ae-and-moneyguidepro%e2%84%a2-integration-is-now-live/ http://www.ipsadvisorpro.com/investment-policy-statement-blog/2009/06/ips-advisorpro%c2%ae-and-moneyguidepro%e2%84%a2-integration-is-now-live/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:29 +0000 Staff Writer http://www.ipsadvisorpro.com/?p=889 IPS AdvisorPro® and MoneyGuidePro^TM Integrate Software Systems, to provide a Complete Financial and Investment Planning Solution

IPS AdvisorPro® is pleased to announce the release of its first software integration with MoneyGuidePro^TM, the industry’s leading financial planning software tool.  With this announcement, the integration between these two industry award-winning online financial software programs is available immediately to IPS AdvisorPro® users.  The new integration will save time and streamline the preparation of financial plans and investment policy statements (IPS) ensuring consistency of data between the two programs and providing financial advisors with a complete financial and investment planning solution.

MoneyGuidePro^TM offers an exciting new approach to Financial Planning.  MoneyGuidePro^TM provides a goal-oriented process that is faster, easier and more engaging for the client.  Advisors can create a Retirement Lifestyle Plan to show clients how to maximize the satisfaction and enjoyment they will obtain from their money during their lifetime.  It is particularly effective in helping restore client confidence during down markets.  MoneyGuidePro^TM has been hailed as “the most innovative product to come along in a long time” and was selected as the “Software of the Year for 2008″ by Morningstar.

In order to make use of the integration between IPS AdvisorPro® and MoneyGuidePro^TM, users must be currently licensed with  programs.

Data created in MoneyGuidePro^TM can be automatically downloaded to IPS AdvisorPro®, including:

• Client data (e.g. client name, contact information, etc.) is imported from MoneyGuidePro^TM into the IPS questionnaire and utilized in the IPS itself.
• Investment Account information, including account name or description and its current amount is imported from MoneyGuidePro^TM into the IPS questionnaire.
• The MoneyGuidePro^TM or FinaMetrica Risk Tolerance questions, answers and numerical Risk Score are imported from MoneyGuidePro^TM into the IPS questionnaire.  The IPS AdvisorPro® user will need to manually enter the phrase or description that they feel best describes the imported data.  The manually entered phrase or description is shown in the IPS.
• The selected Target Portfolio Model is imported from MoneyGuidePro^TM and utilized in the IPS.  As part of this import, the model name, the asset classes, proportional allocation percentages, return percentage, and standard deviation (indicating whether based on historical or projected values) are imported from MoneyGuidePro^TM.  This imported data and the pie chart generated from that data is shown in the 3rd step of the IPS creation process (the asset allocation determination) as well as in the actual IPS.
• A date tracking system will allow easy checking of the last date when information from MoneyGuidePro^TM was downloaded into IPS AdvisorPro®.

We’re very excited to bring this valuable addition to the IPS AdvisorPro® platform at no additional cost to currently licensed IPS AdvisorPro® users.  We believe that this integration will provide a number of benefits, including: reduced data entry time, consistent information between the financial plan and the IPS, and a much easier way to update key elements of an IPS, keeping it aligned with the changes made in the MoneyGuidePro^TM plan.

We expect this data integration to be the first of several that we will bring to you over the coming months, so be sure to check out the latest information, tools, case studies, and advanced training opportunities on www.IPSAdvisorPro.com.

Sincerely,

Norman M. Boone, MBA, CFP®
Linda Lubitz Boone, CFP®
Co-Founders

In response to the degree of market downturn and unusual investment results in 2008, we just implemented an update to questions 8 & 9 in the Risk Tolerance questionnaire. In conjunction with these revisions, you may wish to update your existing client IPSs accordingly.  Additionally, if you are using parallel questionnaires, you may want to adjust those, as well. 

___________________________________________________________________________

FULL DESCRIPTION — ALL UPDATES

Greetings IPS AdvisorPro® community!

As always, we thank-you for your support and appreciate your feedback.  We are committed to reading and considering all suggestions, and paying close attention to any functional issues that are identified. Your comments are very valuable and we encourage you to continue communicating with us!

We would like to call your attention to several revisions and/or improvements that were just applied to the system.  They are, as follows:

NOTIFICATION OF SYSTEM UPDATES

• Upon logging into IPS AdvisorPro® you will be alerted to system updates.

RISK TOLERANCE QUESTIONNAIRE MODIFICATION

• Questions 8 & 9 have been updated to address the degree of downturn and unusual investment results in 2008. These updates include a new chart with a corresponding note in question 8; and the investor’s response choices in question 9 include an increase in percentage values relative to the amount of risk they are willing to take. In conjunction with these revisions, you may wish to update your existing client IPSs, accordingly. Additionally, if you are using any parallel questionnaires you may want to adjust those, as well.

STANDARD QUESTIONNAIRE ADJUSTMENT –  TIME HORIZON QUESTION

• The question on Time Horizon in the STANDARD questionnaire has been adjusted to correct an output error which was occurring in the STANDARD IPS,

‘ACCOUNT TOTAL’ VALUE ALIGNMENT CORRECTED

• The ‘account total’ value will now align properly below the individual account values.

ADVISOR QUESTIONNAIRE -  SELECTION OF INVESTMENT CONSTRAINTS

• The option to ‘check all’ or ‘uncheck all’ is now available.

DOWNLOADABLE QUESTIONNAIRES – NEW LINK

• For your convenience, the “Home’ page now includes a link to ‘DOWNLOAD QUESTIONNAIRES.’

Once again, we thank-you for using IPS AdvisorPro®.

Norm Boone, Linda Lubitz Boone, Co-Founders, and the IPS AdvisorPro® team

The following upgrades have been added to your system:

1. Historical Data Update:

The statistical data for the asset classes in IPS AdvisorPro® have been updated to include the year 2008.

UPDATING YOUR MODELS: To implement the statistics update of your asset allocation models, please go to System Setup then click on Asset Allocation Model Management. Open each model on your list with a [STATS] symbol; this will apply the update andthe [STATS] notification next to the model will be removed.

PLEASE NOTE: Models created with custom asset classes in which you were required to input your own portfolio level risk and return statistics WILL NOT be updated. In order to update the data in these models, you will need to obtain the information necessary to manually insert current risk and return data because you are not using the IPS AdvisorPro® statistics.

2. Advisor Questionnaire

The Rebalancing Procedures paragraph will display in any Investment Policy you create ONLY if the response to question 5: Will the portfolio be rebalanced periodically in the Advisor Questionnaire is marked “yes.”

3. Investor Questionnaire (affects Professional and Standard version of Individual/Family AND Trust)

Affected Section: Investment Objectives

Question: Achieving the Investor’s Goals

I/F: Professional — number 13; Standard – number 6

Trust: Professional – number 17; Standard – number 10

On regulatory and legal advice, in the Investor Questionnaire for individual/family and trust clients we have eliminated the question “If the analysis included a Monte Carlo simulation, what was the probability of success?” and the follow-on question as to the date of the simulation. What remains is the checkbox and question regarding whether or not there will be a target investment return for the client; then if so, a) the needed rate of return, after fees and expenses, to achieve the investor’s goals, and b) the expected rate of inflation. We suggest that this remaining return information suffices for the purpose of producing a complete and satisfactory IPS.

For those who still want to include the probability of success of your monte carlo analysis in your client’s IPS, we suggest that you either include this information as part of your free-form discussion on “Investor Circumstances” in the Client Questionnaire, or make a change to your IPS AdvisorPro® templates so that a paragraph is included that appropriately describes the analysis, with blanks for the probability percentage and the date the analysis was performed, which you can easily complete in Step 5 (Modify IPS) of the IPS process.

PLEASE NOTE: This system modification includes the removal of the paragraph titled “Capital Needs Analysis” in the Individual/Family and Trust templates and ALL EXISTING Individual/Family and Trust IPSs which included data based on a Monte Carlo simulation.

4. Asset Classes – name change

Naming change: “REITS” has been changed to “U.S. Real Estate Securities/REITS.”

5. Template Changes

The Account Information table (used to list client accounts) in the PROFESSIONAL and STANDARD templates now includes a column for the “Custodian” which will allow this information to display in your IPS output. Previously, this information was collected in the questionnaire but not displayed in the IPS output.

6. User Management change

The Account Administrator for your IPS AdvisorPro® license can now generate a User Permissions Report. The report includes the user names, roles, and indicates whether they can/cannot manage specific areas in the system. This function can be found under the Account Administration tab—User Management—View User Permissions Report.

The Compliance moderator now has the ability to view and generate IPSs.

The General Administrator can now manage user permissions.

7. Security

To protect your data from inappropriate attempts to access your IPS AdvisorPro® system, user accounts will lock automatically after 3 unsuccessful login attempts. If you fail to successfully log-in within the first three attempts, you will need to wait for 15 minutes before trying again. In the event that a user other than the Account Administrator is locked out, the Account Administrator has the ability to ‘unlock’ their account in the User Management screen under the Account Administration tab.

Bond Benchmark Names

All references to Lehman have been replaced with Barclays Capital, which bought the rights to the Lehman indices.

8. Cover Page:

The amount of whitespace on the cover page has been reduced.