Financial Advisors Agree: Account Aggregation Supports Better and More Personalized Financial Guidance for Clients According to CashEdge Survey

Aggregation Used to Capture Held-Away Assets

New York – December 3, 2009 — CashEdge, Inc., the preeminent provider of financial account aggregation services to brokerages, wealth management firms and financial advisors, today announced the results of its first annual financial advisor survey, which is available for download at http://www.alldatadvisor.com/survey-register.php.

The CashEdge survey polled more than 120 active advisors about their views on aggregation, client service and the current challenges and opportunities they are facing. Overwhelmingly, advisors agree that aggregation is becoming more important – saving time, enabling better services and providing a mechanism for increasing assets under management.

“The financial portfolios of today’s investors are growing more complex with an expanding array of assets and liabilities. If you couple that with the recent market volatility, an advisor’s job of protecting and growing their clients’ wealth is becoming more challenging everyday.” said Tom Roberts, SVP & General Manager of Wealth Management for CashEdge, Inc. “As a result, the need for a complete picture of each client’s portfolio is more critical than ever and empowers advisors to develop the kind of personalized advice that builds stronger client relationships and ultimately enables them to capture more assets.”

Key Findings

• A holistic view of a client’s portfolio enables better financial guidance: 98 percent of advisors believe that a complete picture of a client’s financial portfolio would enable better, more personalized advice to their clients.
• Most advisors are missing an opportunity to generate fee-income on held-away assets: 88 percent of financial advisors provide advice on held-away assets, only 40 percent of these advisors are charging fees for this service.
• Most advisors are spending too much time manually aggregating client data: 58 percent of advisors aggregating client account information do so manually, nearly half are spending 11 hours or more per month on this process.
• Investor interest in aggregation is growing: 92 percent of advisors have received a proactive inquiry from a client about account aggregation.
• Advisors use aggregation to increase assets under management: 64 percent of advisors who aggregate client information are doing so to capture held-away assets.

About this Survey

Conducted in October 2009, CashEdge’s advisor survey polled more than 120 full-time, U.S.-based financial advisors who have been actively advising investors for five or more years. 59 percent of these respondents described themselves as Registered Independent Advisors, 29 percent were affiliated with independent broker dealers and 12 percent were advisors with major wire houses.

For more information on this survey or to receive the executive summary, please contact Kathleen Fusco: Kathleen@0to5.com, 215.939.5709. The executive summary is available for download here: http://www.alldatadvisor.com/survey-register.php

About CashEdge Brokerage & Wealth Management Division
CashEdge is the preeminent provider of financial account aggregation services to brokerages, wealth management firms, financial advisors and providers of personal financial management applications. These services are highly secure and provide a holistic view of a client's or consumer's financial picture, delivering aggregated data from more than 10,000 sources, including banking, investment, retirement, insurance, credit card, mortgages and annuities. For more information, visit www.AllDataAdvisor.com. The Company is headquartered in New York with offices in Silicon Valley and India. For more information, visit www.cashedge.com.

Download the Financial Advisor Survey

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