Products October 21, 2021

Raymond James Rolls Out Alerts Portal and Succession Planning Platform

In addition to easing the burden of succession planning, the firm is seeking to create more efficient collaboration among financial advisers and their teams.

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Raymond James has launched a new portal for financial advisers and their teams that consolidates firm, department and practice notifications into one centralized dashboard, according to Chief Information Officer Vin Campagnoli.

The Alerts Portal is customizable and allows advisers to create multiple ways to organize and forecast tasks for individuals and teams. Integration across the Raymond James technology platform enables advisers to more easily respond to notifications that impact their clients and business.

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“The Alerts Portal is another tool we’ve incorporated into our technology suite to help financial advisers and their teams stay organized and manage their to-do lists, all from a centralized portal,” Campagnoli says. “This new tool supports greater efficiency and collaboration.”

Teams can set notification priorities based on their individual roles to maximize efficiency, with the added ability to claim alerts and add comments that are visible to others in real time. Raymond James says interactive graphs that dynamically display what the day will look like, along with the ability to take notes and view each alert’s action history, make it easy to take ownership and collaborate on key tasks.

A variety of preferences enable advisers and their team members to customize the portal based on their business needs, including personalizing priority levels. The firm says its Alerts Portal simplifies the process of alert management so advisers and teams can spend more time connecting with clients and growing their businesses.

Alongside the Alerts Portal, Raymond James has also launched a new Practice Exchange solution billed as “a robust and holistic succession planning platform for Raymond James advisers.”

Robert Goff, vice president, succession and acquisition planning at Raymond James, explains that the Practice Exchange solution is a cloud-based tool powered by FindBob. It is designed to bring clarity and ease to the succession planning process for advisers looking to grow their practices, protect their assets and/or prepare for their own retirements.

According to Goff, the new platform offers financial advisers a one-stop location for merger and acquisition (M&A) tools, prospective buyer/seller matching and succession planning education. 

“We’re committed to developing the support resources financial advisers need to plan for their clients’ financial futures, and for the future of their own practices,” adds Scott Curtis, Raymond James Private Client Group president. “Building on our long-established succession and acquisition consulting support, we’re introducing this application to streamline and facilitate the succession planning process for advisers.”

To streamline and facilitate succession and acquisition planning, the Practice Exchange platform offers financial advisers the following capabilities:

  • Succession matching, described as a proprietary algorithm to connect sellers and prospective acquirers based on preferences and business attributes;
  • Valuation and education support, alongside additional financing tools;
  • Catastrophic and succession planning; and
  • Secure information sharing, providing a secure space to review agreements, perform due diligence and negotiate with future partners.
Compliance October 20, 2021

Taxpayers Association Seeks Supreme Court Review of ERISA Pre-emption Case

The plaintiffs in the case believe California should not be permitted to operate the CalSavers Retirement Savings Program on the grounds that its establishment violates federal ERISA pre-emption rules—claims rejected by both a district and an appellate court.

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Nearly six months after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their lawsuit, the plaintiffs in an Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) pre-emption lawsuit have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up their case.

The lawsuit, filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, sought to block the CalSavers Retirement Savings Program on the grounds that the ERISA, a piece of federal legislation, pre-empts CalSavers, therefore invalidating the program. These claims were previously rejected by both the 9th Circuit and the District Court for the Eastern District of California.

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In its dismissal earlier this year, the appellate court found that ERISA does not pre-empt CalSavers in the way the plaintiffs suggest. In summary, the court’s logic was that CalSavers is not an ERISA plan because it is established and maintained by the state, not employers. Furthermore, it does not require employers to operate their own ERISA plans, and it does not have an impermissible reference to or connection with ERISA. Nor does CalSavers interfere with ERISA’s core purposes, the court ruled, concluding for all these reasons that ERISA does not pre-empt the California law.

As is the standard procedure in Supreme Court appeals, the appellants early in their petition offer a short and succinct summary of their legal question: “Considering California’s infamous record of mismanagement, corruption and the cavernous underfunding of its public employee retirement systems, is California permitted under federal law (ERISA) to now require private employers to automatically debit employee paychecks and surrender those earnings to the state to manage as ‘retirement savings,’ despite the state expressly disclaiming any fiduciary accountability, and despite Congress having exercised its authority under the Congressional Review Act to veto a Department of Labor [DOL] regulation that briefly carved out an ERISA safe harbor for such state-run automatic retirement savings plans?”

The last part of the question refers to actions the DOL took between 2015 and 2017. In short, the DOL under former President Barack Obama first crafted a rule that would provide a pathway for states like California to create retirement savings programs that would not be subject to all the normal rules and requirements put on private employers under ERISA. President Donald Trump’s administration later did away with this “safe harbor” rule.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s appeal to the Supreme Court includes various arguments to the effect that, once in state hands, participant employees’ money will not have the security that Congress intended.

“[Participant assets] will not be protected by any fiduciary duty or contractual liability, but will be at risk under a statute that expressly disclaims any responsibility for loss,” the appeal alleges.

The full text of the appeal is available here.

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