Fidelity releases WealthCentral Mobile for the iPhone
- Fidelity launched WealthCentral Mobile for iPhone, offering RIAs client data access.
- WealthCentral Mobile provides client profiles, positions, balances, and history.
- App design incorporates user testing insights, including finger-tracking analysis.
- RIAs praise mobile access and built-in news feature for improved efficiency.
Editor’s Note: RIABiz first broke this story last month when it looked at how all the RIA custodians are thundering into the world of mobile devices. See: Fidelity, Schwab and TD Ameritrade prep for arms race in mobile technology for advisors. Also see our mention of Pershing’s similar suite of NetX360 mobile apps in: Nevin looks under the NetX360 hood after it gets 100,000 new users and some overhauling.
Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services has been working on a version of WealthCentral for the iPhone for six months, and today announced that it is available in Apple’s app store.
A version for the Android operating system and the iPad are also on their way in the coming months for WealthCentral, according to Ed O’Brien, senior vice president and head of technology for Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services. WealthCentral is Fidelity’s basic technology platform for RIAs plus integrations with Advent Software, Black Diamond Performance Reporting, Oracle CRM and EISI planning for advisors who choose to pay extra for them.
The mobile app has four main views within each client:
- Profile gives an overview of a client — their contact details, net worth, and account number. Supports tap-to-call and will support tap-to-email and tap-to-map in upcoming releases.
- Positions shows specific holdings, total value, gains and losses.
- Balances gives detail on account totals and buying power.
- History reveals a list of all of the recent events on the account.
Fidelity wins converts to WealthCentral, but most of its advisors have yet to make the switch
Page Clark, product manager responsible for mobile technologies, explained during my demo of the app that many of the design choices came from previous user testing experience with Fidelity’s retail iPone app. Fidelity has a user testing lab at their headquarters in Boston called the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, or “F-Cat,” that is host to eye- and finger-tracking equipment for desktop and now mobile apps.
Finger tracking
Rick Adkins, CEO of Arkansas Financial Group, an RIA in Little Rock with $260 million in AUM, is one of Fidelity Instituitonal Wealth Services’ 40 beta testers, 10 of whom were involved in the iPhone app testing and development, and gave me an account of the finger-tracking experience.
Alerts are served up in the
native iPhone format.
Story Timeline
“It’s like being in 24 — you can’t see out but they can see in,” he said with a smile. “They had an iPhone that had sample data loaded in, and she would say 'If you wanted to do such-and-such, what would you do?’”
Adkins is very pleased with the result of the trips to Boston for highly precise tapping-measurement. “I don’t have to be in my office to have an incredible amount of information at my fingertips,” he said. “If a client calls and has a question, I can pretty well answer it.”
One unexpected praise was the built-in news feature. Adkins was delighted to unsubscribe to all of his news email alerts and only access what he was interested though the app. “This little news button did more to clean up my email box than I could have imagined!”
Technology review: Fidelity's WealthCentral is solid and smart but still has seams
But the feedback cycle started before development of the app. David Canter, executive vice president at FIWS and head of Fidelity’s practice management, leads a team of seven that works with WealthCentral users around the country to help them improve their operational efficiency. He said that discussion of mobile platforms like the iPhone have become part of the natural flow of the conversation.
“[Mobile apps] are something we hear about on a weekly basis.”
Web views
Client detail is served in an
HTML view.
WealthCentral Mobile follows a pattern we’ve seen within mobile apps for advisors, which is the use of web views. Web views are basically small browser frames embedded within apps that allow the vendor to serve up dynamic HTML as a portion of the screen instead of using the normal buttons and controls that are platform-specific.
This comes with benefits and drawbacks: It saves time in development, since web-portions can also be served to apps on different platforms (like Android and BlackBerry), and it also means that the vendor can make a change in presentation and it will update for everyone the next time they open the app. The drawback is that the web views are slightly more clunky than native controls, so the user sometimes has to tap repeatedly to get what they want.
See: Technology review: Fidelity’s WealthCentral is solid and smart but still has seams
WealthCentral Mobile strikes a good balance of web views and native controls that makes most of the navigation snappy, and passes the buck to HTML5 when there are lots of complex data to display.
Clarke said that the team of developers was entirely in-house, and offered this as evidence that Fidelity is entering the mobile space with the intention of sticking around. She said the team plans to approach the iPad version differently, since they see it as a distinctly different use case.
Final note: Some third-party vendors have also developed mobile apps. See: Black Diamond releases BlueSky Mobile for the iPad and Orion Advisor Services goes mobile with advisor-branded apps for the iPhone and Android
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