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| TECHNOLOGY Gadgets, Devices, & Advice - Consumer Electronics Reviews and Recommendations Making Technology a Productive Part of Your Life PRR's - Personal Radio Recorders May be the Future of the Indstry Click here Perfect Storm Brewing For Consumer Electronics? Convert Your Old Computer Into The Ultimate Media Device - Parts I & II By William S. Herz Chief Technologist and Consumer Electronics Editor-at-Large Plus: First Southwest to Offer Albridge Solutions To It's Network Of Broker/Dealers ______________________________________________________________________________________________ iPad Arrives Did the iPhone just get a lot bigger or did Steve Jobs just get a lot smaller? Looks like a giant iPhone to us. Non-3G price: $499 - with 3G technology, thats an extra $140, plus $30/month connectivity charge for one year. Total cost for a 3G iPad; about $1000, for year one. Click here ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ First Southwest to Offer Albridge Solutions To It's Network Of Broker/Dealers 08 October 2007 - First Southwest Correspondent Clearing of Dallas is becoming the first clearing firm to offer Albridge Solutions to their broker/dealer clients. In a move aimed at gaining clients in the increasingly competitive clearing platform space (owned by giants like Pershing and NFS, and upstart B/D's that self-clear and provide clearing to other B/D's, like LPL), First Southwest is the first firm to offer access to the services of Albridge Solutions to firms using their clearing services. Albridge Soltuions is a leading firm in providing consolidated statements and performance data to clients, which can be known as "single-view" reporting. In essence, regardless of where the assets are held, be they at a mutual fund family, a variable annuity company, or a brokerage account (although in this case it would presumably have to be Southwest), the client can be handed a single statement. Consolidated reporting, long considered to be the "Holy Grail" in terms of aggregating cleints' holdings, and high atop the wish list of financial professionals for the pasy decade, is, according to a statement released by First Southwest, available only to 50% of financial planners and advisors. It should also be pointed out that the 50% that do have consolidated statements and data reporting probably only have a limited version of it, depending on their firm. Most wirehouses, since they have generally held or reported nearly all of their clients holdings through a brokerage account have long operated with a version of it. Merrill Lynch rolled out a program called "Total Merrill" in the early part of this decade as a way of trying to group nearly all of a clients financial matters under one umbrella. First Southwest plans to roll out Albridge on a limited basis to a select number of B/D's currently clearing with them during the fourth quarter. You can ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | |
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