When do statements make a firm broker? When they cost more to send than the money in the account on which they are reporting. Please excuse my mangling the English language to get the point across, but I wanted to share something that happens all too often in the financial industry.

Continue Reading »

Broker Monitor’s 2010 Annual Statement Analysis is hot off the press! As in past years, we reviewed the statements from a wide variety of brokerage firms, ranked them and recognized the best in a number of different areas. Overall, Merrill Lynch continues to offer the best client statement in the industry – beating out all other competitors for the fourth year in a row. Both the design and content of Merrill Lynch’s statement remain strong, with excellent account summary details and good use of graphics.

The top five brokerage statements in our analysis belong to Merrill Lynch, UBS, Wells Fargo Advisors, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (legacy Smith Barney statement) and Charles Schwab. But what exactly makes these statements better than those of their peers? Continue Reading »

“Mobile” has been on the minds of many this May, as a number of firms across our different Monitor coverage groups introduced or improved mobile features. 

Wells Fargo introduced a new set of account alerts that notify clients via SMS when an alert is triggered. Six new alerts were added, including alerts that inform customers if transactions occur outside the U.S., if charges were made at a gas pump, if a transaction exceeds a designated amount, if a transaction was declined. The new alert service is available only to customers who are enrolled in Online Banking. Similarly, Bank of America now allows customers to request their account balance, transaction history and customer service phone numbers via SMS. Chase and KeyBank provide similar text command capabilities. Continue Reading »

AXA Equitable recently became the first Annuity Monitor firm to implement digital document delivery.  Annuity policyholders received their 2009 annual reports - normally a bulky, hundred-plus page paper booklet - on a single compact disc. This convenient distribution method will help save not only the environment but also millions in operating expenses. Continue Reading »

A recent Ignites article suggests that one excellent cost saving opportunity being overlooked by annuity providers is the promotion of eDelivery to investors. This conclusion is based on the NewRiver survey, which polled over 500 variable annuity or variable universal life insurance policy owners, aged 45 or older. The article raises some excellent points as to the possible reasons for the lack of promotions, including the high degree of compliance regulation applicable to annuities that may impact the streamlined delivery of electronic documents.

However, after taking a closer look at our Annuity Monitor coverage firms, we found that 79% of the firms we track are currently promoting electronic delivery to their clients. Continue Reading »

March was a busy month for the Corporate Insight tracked firms. Perhaps the most notable changes this month took place in the credit card space, as every firm in our Credit Card Monitor coverage group made announcements about changes relating to the CARD Act. Every firm posted notices alerting customers that their statements had been made available online. Additionally, several firms, including American Express, HSBC and U.S. Bank, either updated or announced updates to their monthly statements. HSBC also removed its Rush Payment service, which allowed customers to post same-day payments for a fee of $15. Prior to eliminating Rush Payment, HSBC had been the only Credit Card Monitor firm to charge customers for same-day online payments. Continue Reading »

By Ben Pousty, Corporate Insight, March 03, 2010

TIAA-CREF’s TC Listens website is an innovative new medium for obtaining client feedback online.

Financial services firms have always coveted feedback and opinions about their websites and online services. This information offers an invaluable blueprint for improving the user-experience for three key audiences—prospective investors, clients and financial professionals. It also sheds light on the practices of competitors.

Continue Reading »

As we discussed in last week’s Credit Card Monitor, every issuer that we track recently added the ability for customers to order their card agreements through the card website. Although this is a mandated feature, our research showed there are good ways and bad ways of doing this.

In this short video, I explain why American Express demonstrates best practices in providing access to customer agreements. Continue Reading »

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 »