solutions that work

That’s a central observation of this year’s Retirement Confidence Survey, conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and Greenwald Associates. While three in four retirees continue to believe they’ll have enough for a comfortable retirement, less than a third are “very confident” – down from 39% in 2016 – of this rosy outcome. Confidence

De Beers, the largest diamond manufacturer in the world, announced this week that the firm will begin to offer man-made diamonds in addition to mined diamonds. This is a dramatic turnaround for the company that was so instrumental in building the value proposition for natural stones and whose head of research and development, as recently

Loyalty and reward programs have become a ubiquitous part of the consumer landscape. From coffee shops to food chains to, well, almost anything you can think of (a dental practice we know sends its patients gift cards on special occasions good toward their bill), you can probably find a perks program. For consumer goods companies,

Schwab is out with the 2018 installment of its Modern Wealth Index, an online survey that this year scored approximately a thousand participants on a scale between 1 and 100 based on how well they say they manage their money and investments. Respondents provide answers anonymously and directly, so the results tend to be a

It’s no secret that today’s investment advisory market is highly competitive.  RIA’s have enjoyed strong channel growth but are faced with rising threats from re-fashioned brokerage offerings and new market entrants. Asset managers are being buffeted by trends towards passive management, fee pressure, and performance headwinds.  All this has made it challenging for investment advisors

Earlier this month Schwab announced the creation of its new Digital Accelerator Hubs. These Silicon Valley Startup like organizations combine cross-functional talent from different disciplines to employ an Agile approach to “rapidly ideate, iterate and test new ideas related to specific user journeys or business opportunities.” The new units will explore creative solutions across Schwab’s

Google has a fun game called Quick Draw. It’s an experiment in which we (the entire global society) can help teach a neural network to recognize doodles. The more we play and draw, the more the machine will learn how to identify a specific object. To date, there have been over 15 million players who

While not quite as scary as lions and tigers and bears, the many approaches to investment management can seem daunting, particularly when wealth managers are considering what to offer. Throw in the question of proprietary, open architecture or a mix of both, and things really get complicated. And that’s all before we’ve even raised the