We publish a regular monthly newsletter that offers information and insight into our syndicated monthly reports, as well as a "month-in-review" section we call News & Highlights. As some of you may not subscribe to our newsletter (why not? it’s free), we will begin posting it here on a monthly basis.

In March a number of things happened; Wells Fargo announced its new vSafe service, which, according to the firm, will allow online banking customers to store important digital documents - from bank statements and birth certificates to personal photographs - in the firm’s new storage system. vSafe is the first digital storage system we have come across in any of our Monitors. Information about vSafe is limited at the moment, but it seems Wells Fargo has hit on a valuable idea. More and more important documents are being stored digitally, but few people save all of their documents in a central, secure location. It is also interesting that Wells Fargo is offering storage services for non-financial documents - doing so could fundamentally change customers’ expectations of the online services banks can provide. We’ll be reporting on vSafe in coming months as more information is made available.

iShares and Oppenheimer both released new desktop-based features for their advisors. iShares’ new Index Leaders and Trailers desktop widget tracks selected indices for a user-specified period of time. Oppenheimer’s new IRA@Hand desktop application helps keep advisors organized and provides easy access to sales and performance information regarding IRAs. The tool is particularly effective as an aggregator, compiling information from the whole of Oppenheimer’s public site in logical sections. iShares and Oppenheimer are the only two firms we track that offer downloadable desktop applications for their advisors. iShares also offers widgets that track market indexes and provide access to the firm’s fund list.

New York Life became the latest firm in our coverage group to add Web 2.0 features to its site. The new tools on the firm’s public site allow users to rate, comment on and share public site pages. Among Annuity Monitor firms, only Vanguard offers similar (though less extensive) user-generated and community-based tools. If properly implemented, user-generated content and community features can be valuable promotional vehicles, allowing clients and prospects to interact with each other and the firm’s products and services in new, substantive ways. Firms should consider adding these features to their sites, particularly as younger, more computer-savvy users become interested in retirement products.