1. Kansas City 2. I founded Illuminate Consulting two years ago to support RIA's and other Financial Services firms with their Operations, Salesforce CRM, and Data Warehouse needs. I am most excited about this because, as a team, we take our big RIA experience and apply it everywhere. We have worked at $100B RIA's and scaled their technology. 3. I consider myself an Operations Evangelist and a Data Wrangler. Some days, being a Data Wrangler is easy, and others, it is akin to riding a bull with a mind of it's own! Here is my LinkedIn if you would like to connect there too!!

@Kate Guillen Perfect, sent you an email! Also here is my company LinkedIn Page

Strategic Planning. Align the company's growth plans with the core Operations foundation to ensure the projects you are prioritizing are achieving those initiatives. Revisit frequently, at a minimum quarterly. Even if the company does not prioritize this, yet, take the time to do it for your department and share it with leadership. Take stock of what has been achieved to date as well. It is far too easy to look at the long list ahead of you and forget how far you've already come! When assessing the project list for Operations, narrow it down to these four areas: 1) Make Money (does it increase sales, or close more prospects?) 2) Save Money (does it reduce spend on people, vendors, or software?) 3) Client Retention (does it contribute to a stellar client experience?) 4) Risk Reduction (does it avoid risk from an error, or an audit?) If the project scores lower on these, push it down and only prioritize projects to help the above. I've seen a COO prioritize data integrity on their fixed income securities (e.g. the inputs for estimated yields) that they spent hundreds of hours a year on trying to validate the fixed income settings in the vendor-maintained security master. Meanwhile, the company struggled to grow their client base. I've never heard a client question a 4.2% yield thinking it was supposed to be 4.5%. Focus on the right things!

Confluence by Atlassian! Beats Word and is free up to 10 users on a team. After that it is $6/user/month. You can also store your handbook in your CRM.

@Tiffany Baptist Last time I spoke with them it was $50M in new assets, and required details about each account type and value amount from where it was coming from. They would route you to their retention team if you were already on the Fidelity platform but moving from a different provider (e.g. breakaway or using a TAMP). The downside there is that the prior firm needed advance notice before you could work with them. So if you have say a 30 day notice period in TAMP contract, or trying to breakaway under the cover of darkness, Fidelity botches that opportunity. Schwab no longer has a minimum AUM given the TD acquisition. But, service levels have suffered since then. Altruist and APEX are both up and comers that I've been following, but they are not as robust as the big name players. However, innovation is top of mind and they are building some cool things.

Agree with Andrew, it is less about the PAS and more about the annuity provider not offering good feed options. DTCC has data feeds from many of the annuity providers, but not all. Then once you get the DTCC feeds, you have to move them yourself into a system. Something I've built before was the DTCC Feed, pulling the files to a data lake in AWS, then pushing the feeds into the CRM (where the client portal lived). DTCC data points show far beyond just values and transactions, you can track commissions, premium payments, surrender charges, applicant details and status, etc. eMoney has multiple API connections for annuity providers, and it is included in the existing contract with eMoney, no additional fees. However not all are available there either. This though is limited to client specific data points like values and transactions, not very robust.