No iOS 7-Updated Mutual Fund, ETF Apps Yet

With all of the attention being paid to the mid-September release of Apple’s iOS 7, I’ve wondered how asset manager iPad (mostly) and iPhone apps weathered the updating process. Are any apps taking advantage of the drastic operating system redesign? Were any apps redesigned to reflect the more flattened look?

For answers to those and other questions, the App Details area of App Annie is a useful resource. (See a related April 11, 2013, post What Are The Most Downloaded Asset Manager iPad, Android Apps?)

After a review of the asset manager apps, it looks as if the short answer is No. While a few of the App Details for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm apps include updates for iOS 7 compatibility and bug-fixing, none is flagged as having been “Redesigned for iOS 7.”

This doesn’t mean that they won’t be. The redesign was unveiled only in June and not all have the capabilities to work around the clock, as other app developers have, to deliver a refresh. My guess is that most of the leaders in the Finance category are preparing redesigns in the expectation that pre-iO7 apps will begin to look, and be, dated. (If you need background on iOS 7, by the way, the iTunes Store includes a Designed for iOS 7 section.)

A handful of asset managers, including a few surprising names, haven’t updated their apps since 2012. Let's not hold our breath looking for iOS 7 updates from them, unless... The optimist in me wonders if something big is in the works, the realist makes me wonder if they're rethinking iPad development as a worthwhile activity.

The absence of iOS 7 updates notwithstanding, App Annie's App Details provide updates on the evolving state of the art of asset manager app capabilities, a few of which are highlighted below.

J.P. Morgan Insights App Climbs The Finance Chart

First, how about some respect for J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s iPad app? If your job includes mobile app development for another investment firm, you’ve probably heard all you care to hear about this app, thank you very much.

But, for the rest of us, check out how this late-starter has made up for lost time. Version 1 of Insights by J.P. Morgan Asset Management was released in May of this year and it now ranks #50 on the iPad Top Charts-United States Finance category apps.

Judging from the description of the capabilities—most of the magic happens behind an Advisor/Advisory Firm or Institution/Consultant registration requirement—this app provides an experience that’s unique to the tablet form factor.

J.P. Morgan is building on its leadership of having provided useful charts and graphs for years offline via its Guide to the Markets. It now enables registered users to create custom versions of the Guide by selecting individual slides for presentation and/or packaging them up as PDFs for clients. Awesome.

The app’s overall popularity speaks to the treasure trove of content and its usefulness for non-registered users. The downloads have to be coming from than investment professionals alone.

The image above is just a screenshot of an (un-embeddable) video of how to use the app. Click on it to go there. 

Other App Enhancements

The following are selected highlights from other reported app enhancements:

Vanguard iPad app (current release: 3.2, September 30, 2013)

• Open an account from the app
• Stay logged on for up to 15 minutes when multitasking or navigating outside the app

Vanguard for Financial Advisors iPhone and iPad apps (current release: 5.3, September 20, 2013) 

• A Briefcase feature for content storage and retrieval  
• Briefcase content is now automatically synched to Apple devices using iCloud 

USAA (current release: 5.8, October 1, 2013) 

• USAA MemberShop, enabling users to take advantage of USAA exclusive savings from merchants 

Fidelity (current release of the iPhone app: 2.2.3, October 1, 2013)

• Instantly connect to customer support by tapping “Call a Rep” 
• Home screen updates, including a U.S. Markets day trend visual 
• Real-time, streaming quote details available to customers who are Active Traders

Schwab (current release of the iPhone app: 3.2.0.298, October 3, 2013)

• Listen to the Schwab Market Update through the new Media Center button on the main panel. It’s updated throughout the day with the latest news, including a performance summary and key market mover statistics.

Blurring The Lines Between Music And Investing

Quick, what tune comes to mind when you think of mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or investing in general?

Nothing, nothing at all? Me either.

In a sound-filled, even noisy world, investing (not trading) is distinguished by its hush. Walk into a mutual fund company, or a financial advisor’s office for that matter, and you’re likelier to “hear” silence than music.

While other businesses use music to communicate energy, optimism or whatever, music is not in the investment firm’s communications toolbox. Too bad, really. Music can add another dimension to an experience. (Not to mention its effect on productivity. If you take a closer look in investment offices, you'll see plenty of people wearing earbuds while they work.)

In the last few months, I’ve collected a few examples of efforts to pair music with investment topics. Is this the start of anything, do you think?

Shelter From The Bonds?

Let’s start with a marketing example—a Bob Dylan-inspired video on an unlikely topic. It’s entertaining, although TastyTrade was probably hoping for more than 60 views.

Branded Playlists

In August it was revealed that Spotify, the music streaming service, was beta-testing a follow feature so marketers could promote branded playlists. 

Ordinarily, the announcement might have fostered just more other-industry envy. Except that Morningstar’s Editor-In-Chief Jerry Kerns has already been doing something like that on Spotify. He’s been creating playlists to accompany issues of Morningstar Advisor.

Issue No. 36_Fund Distribution may be more relevant, but the tracks from Issue No. 35_Bonds will give you a better idea of how the playlist syncs with the focus.

To listen, log in to Spotify and find the jerrykerns account. According to the published numbers, there has been almost zero uptake on this, too. (To be fair, there's been zero promotion—I just happened to see a tweet from Kerns about it.)

The Rhythm Of The Data

Here’s what started me thinking about beats and financial data. The FMS Symphony created a “house-trance,” selecting chords based on the derivative of federal account balance data and a melody based on the federal interest rate data. For more, see this Revolutions post.

Just a warning, when you click on this link or on the image above, you may not love the “cheesy synth” and the volume is set high. But try to hang in there long enough to experience February through October 2008, at least. It’s a soundtrack for the financial crisis.

We have personal life tickers, is it so far-fetched to imagine an asset manager introducing soundtracks for investing over a lifetime? 

Music To Browse By

Do you remember when some early Websites experimented with audio files that auto-launched when visitors landed? There was a bit of a blowback and random Web browsing today is largely free of surprise sounds, including from ads.

Here's one business in private beta, righTune.com, that believes that background music can aid in achieving Website goals. You set the mood and they pick the background music. To my knowledge, this isn't being directed at investing sites. I mention it as an example of more music headed the Web user's way. I'll try to keep an open mind on this one.

Music and investing—do they have a future together?

The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

$SPLV was the PowerShares #ETF with highest net inflows in April.View more in the Connection: pwr.sh/con

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 22, 2013

Most viewed funds on powershares.com this week: $QQQ $PKW $BKLN $SPLV $DBC

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 24, 2013

Data can tell a lot of stories in this business. There’s much more firms can do to creatively present the data they can share.  

It Wouldn’t Kill Us All To Enjoy A Good Laugh

Stipulated: Asset management marketing, financial communications in general, is serious business. But surely there are moments for levity.

Check out the yuks on this unsigned Tumblr blog of animated gifs, “Thoughts Of An IRO: If investor relations professionals could act freely.” (Below is just a screenshot, click on it for the full effect.) There would have been no better format to capture the spirit of this. 

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

What Happens When The Conversation Hits Too Close To Home

The concept of “joining the conversation” can seem a bit artificial. Few online “conversations” are in progress for any length of time and they’re not that easy to pick up on. Besides, most of the time we hit the Web with our own ideas (conversation-starters, if you will) that we hope someone else will get behind and help distribute.

But on April 23, PBS’ Frontline aired a documentary that has prompted an ongoing online conversation about retirement funding and the expense of retirement plans. As tipped off by the title, The Retirement Gamble, the content was provocative. Its position: That fund fees are eroding retirement savings while fund companies and financial advisors in the 401(k) and retirement planning business profit. In the event that you missed it, here’s the link.

The documentary stimulated lots of debate. Most if not all of the online publications that cover finance or retirement issues took note of it, as did all of the leading advisor publications and a few advisor blogs. I’ve added some links at the bottom of this post for you to read a sampling of reactions.  

For another measure of the response to this one-hour television program, see the amount of commenting and social sharing happening on the sites that reported on the documentary. The 12,000 Facebook Recommends, 1,800 tweets and 448 Google+ shares on the PBS site are just the start.

Search interest in the term “retirement gamble” and the related “frontline retirement gamble” search merited a break-out appearance on Google Trends.

Some commentators thought the coverage was fair, others thought it was biased. I’m not going to weigh in on any of that. My interest was in how fund companies would react. Years ago, there would have been no response. But the industry has developed a contemporaneous communications competency, aided by the availability of digital channels and tools. I thought that firms would chime in, on their own sites and maybe in comments on others’.

The Industry's Response

Mindful that the “crafting,” routing and review of a communication on this topic could take a few weeks at some firms, I waited to do a sweep of who said what. But even though I track mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content fairly closely, I hadn’t seen word one. So, I did what anybody else might do (indeed, lots of searchers have already done, as the Google Trends graph shows) and went to Google.

I reviewed all the Google search results for “retirement gamble” and “retirement PBS” looking for an asset manager-authored commentary. The closest I came was an endorsement on JohnCBogle.com, whose footer has a standing disclaimer: “The opinions presented do not necessarily represent those of Vanguard's current management.” 

So, then I searched the asset manager blogs. (This is the kind of topic that blogs are made for!) While I found a few posts about proprietary retirement research (representing conversations that firms wanted to start themselves), my on-site “retirement gamble” and “PBS” searches showed up nothing.

As a final check, I turned to Ignites.com, the subscription-only news site for the mutual fund industry and yes, there were a few articles about the industry’s response to the show.

The first bore the headline, “Industry Blasts PBS Documentary on Retirement,” while “Documentary Damaged Industry's Rep: Poll” headlined the second. According to a poll taken of Ignites readership, “although 38% do not perceive The Retirement Gamble as having inflicted reputational damage, most expressing that view do not perceive the industry as being unscathed either.”

It was from the second article that I learned that at least two firms—Vanguard and Buckingham Asset Management—had commented on The Retirement Gamble on their sites. Vanguard was critical while Buckingham called it a must-watch.

The Ignites article left room for the possibility that other firms are also addressing the documentary in their own way. That made sense. It would be almost impossible to believe that public television could have aired an investigative report on a $10 trillion industry and the industry would have barely made a peep. Surely, talking points were created, media availabilities were distributed to the press, customer service people were prepped with scripts.

A Sustainable Strategy?

But, what about online and in public where much of the debate is happening?

Ignites quoted marketing consultant April Rudin as suggesting (but not necessarily agreeing with) that some firms would be choosing not to refer to the documentary by name to keep from giving it any more attention.

Seriously? The industry’s response is symptomatic of thinking that predates a time before today. A time when there was a lopsided relationship between brands and consumers. When brands, which had the resources to control messaging and communication platforms, effectively dictated who gets attention and who doesn’t.            

While asset managers can refuse to dignify the documentary with a public response, they can’t impose silence on others. As shown in their comments and social shares, empowered clients (investors and advisors) are taking to the Web to react, to compare notes with others and to wonder about whether their 401(k) plan providers’ interests are aligned with theirs.

Ignoring a controversy central to the fund industry’s business won’t make it go away. And, it will endear the industry no further to its clients.

Preparing a response without acknowledging PBS or The Retirement Gamble by name advances nothing. It simply raises the likelihood that a firm's statement will be overlooked in the online debate, some of which is driven by keyword-specific searches.  

Vanguard is one of this industry’s communications leaders but it wasn’t one of the firm’s finest moments when they published an April 29 blog post that studiously avoids the documentary’s name. I count more than 30 comments, including comments made to other commenters, on the post. The first comment was to the point: “Thanks for the article. What is the name of the documentary?” It was another commenter on the post who provided the title and a link.

This is the world we live in. Others can be expected to initiate and conduct conversations that are not flattering to us or that we would prefer to avoid. The conversation on retirement funding and affordability, specifically, is one that can benefit from more discourse by more informed entities. There is a lot of confusion out there, revealed not created by The Retirement Gamble.  

From the luxury of my perch outside your four walls, this looks like a communications opportunity for asset managers that are willing to step up, to address issues head-on, to listen and to show themselves to be accountable in public even when on the defense.     

Or, maybe you disagree. If you do or if I have somehow missed something, I hope you’ll say so below.

Also see (included in part for their mix of reader comments):

401(k) Documentary Ruffles Feathers

Advisors Stung By Frontline Attack

The Dull Task of Decoding 401(k) Fees Matters

The Retirement Gamble

Winning The Retirement Gamble: Step 1 Adjust Your Mindset

5 Examples Of What Works For Asset Managers On Facebook

What works on Facebook? Here’s a quick look at five asset manager posts that are generating the most response lately, as measured by the number of people who have “liked” the update.

Likes are a good thing. Brands whose Facebook fans engage with them more regularly (via Likes, Shares, comments or check-ins) have a greater likelihood of being seen in fans' news feeds. And this can result in amplifying the reach of your updates to your users' networks.

Across the board, this industry is woefully behind the Like totals being racked up by others. At the tippity top is Coca-Cola, whose 58 million likes make it Facebook’s most liked brand (after Facebook, that is). The most liked asset manager is Vanguard, with 115,000 likes as of this writing.

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