For nearly a year and half, most Wachovia customers have been waiting patiently to see when and how the merger with Wells Fargo would affect them. For some customers, this process has been too slow, as seen in the comments sections of the Wells Fargo – Wachovia Blog. That said, it appears that there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

Last week, Wachovia removed all its branded credit cards on the public site, and replaced them with Wells Fargo cards. As for existing card customers, on April 10, 2010, all Wachovia credit card accounts will officially be integrated into Wells Fargo, and aside from a site outage from April 9-11, service should be uninterrupted, as card numbers and rates will stay the same. It’s currently unclear if Wells Fargo will mail clients newly branded cards after the conversion, but clients can still use their old cards in the interim.  Continue Reading »

Take a look at the statement image. On it, you’ll see roughly $30,000 in fraudulent transactions. On 9/26 there are seven transactions, in Helsinki Finland for just under $5,000 each. How these charges made it through any kind of reasonable security check is beyond us.

It should be noted that the cardholder, one of our employees, has never set foot in Finland. Continue Reading »

With 2010 almost upon us, firms rushed to make their end-of-year changes and introduce new programs.

Chase Introduces New Charitable Initiative through Facebook

Chase’s new Community Giving Program allows customers to vote, through Facebook, for their favorite charities, with top vote-getters receiving donations from Chase. In some ways, Chase’s Community Giving Program is a hybrid of two innovative programs previously introduced by other credit card issuers: Citibank’s Make a Difference program, introduced earlier this year, also utilizes Facebook as a platform through which users can help solicit donations to their favorite charities, while American Express’s Members Project, which ran in 2007 and 2008, allowed card holders to vote for new projects that would be funded by AmEx. Continue Reading »

Considering the popular Apple iPhone application commercials, one might wonder if there is an app for absolutely everything. Dog whistle? Check. Subway maps? Check. Is there an app for forecasting a child’s college education expenses? Check; thanks to AXA Equitable, there is.

The firm recently added an image to the public homepage that promotes their free College Savings iPhone application. In fact, the firm currently offers multiple financially-based applications, such as the Life Expectancy and Retirement Shortfall calculators. Continue Reading »

In February of 2007, TIAA-CREF introduced a beta version of their retirement-focused online community, MyRetirement.org, to a select group of clients. Recently the firm rolled the site out to its broader client base through an email invitation.

MyRetirement.org provides a unique outlet for the firm’s clients to discuss a number of topics, including investment and saving strategies, travel and leisure plans, even health and fitness tips. This broad range of financial- and lifestyle-focused content should appeal to the interests of the firm’s unique customer base, i.e., those with backgrounds in the academic, research, medical and cultural fields. Continue Reading »

The big news for September revolves around Roth conversions. In the advisor realm, there was an influx of promotions surrounding the 2010 Roth conversion opportunity. A number of firms in our coverage groups are now supplying their advisors and brokers with new online marketing materials to help get ahead of the competition.

Continue Reading »

Ignites posted a video recently of Mark Jamison’s comments at Schwab’s recent Impact conference in which he discusses the five things advisors can do to ease investor angst.

His list included be empathetic, connect and be caring, validate, be optimistic, and be solution oriented. He is absolutely correct but I don’t think the points are limited to advisors alone. Continue Reading »

In the Spring issue of our Consulting Insights publication, we discussed the recent rise of a number of new, innovative online aggregation services. There, and more recently in this blog post, we highlighted Mint.com as a leader in providing valuable, customer-friendly personal financial management (PFM) tools and advice. Apparently PFM software giant Intuit saw significant value in Mint as well, acquiring the firm for an impressive $170 million in a recently-confirmed deal.

Continue Reading »

New legislation set to take effect in 2010 removes the $100,000 MAGI limit for Roth IRA conversions, greatly expanding eligibility. Beginning in 2010, people can convert to a Roth IRA regardless of their income… but many investors may not have even known about it if they relied on information from their brokers alone. We simply have not seen many brokerage firms addressing this issue, until recently that is.

Our Merrill Lynch broker recently sent us an email with a couple of Q&A guides from the firm regarding the expanded Roth IRA conversion eligibility and this is the first time, in fact, that any of our brokers have addressed the issue. The upcoming change is a result of a provision in the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act (TIPRA) of 2005.

This is certainly a big deal because Roth IRAs have a number of benefits not available in Traditional IRAs, and with the income restriction removed, many more individuals can take advantage of them. This is something that brokerage firms should promote, since it can be a better retirement savings option for some clients. It makes sense that we have not seen this highted heavily up to this point, since it does not go into effect for another four months. But as we get closer to the end of the year, we expect to see this become more front-and-center when firms talk about retirement savings.

With the introduction of Chase’s new Ultimate Rewards program in July, we decided to switch our coverage from the firm’s legacy (and no longer promoted) Flex Rewards card to the Ultimate Rewards-affiliated Freedom card. The easiest way to do this, we assumed, would be to call a customer service representative (CSR), tell them we currently have a card account, and see if they could help us switch the account over to the new rewards program. When we actually called Chase, however, we hit a wall of confusion. Continue Reading »