Fundsters and other vendors with designs on RIA channel greatness, beware. Your marketing often smells a bit too much like old school Wall Street.

Brooke Southall RIAbiz.com Managing Principal

So warns Brooke Southall of RIABiz in a tirade against the preponderence of practices and jargon "with a whiff of closed architecture, overcharging, inauthenticity, opacity or idiocy masquerading as information." The trade publications wants vendors to shape up their marketing and their jargon when it comes to working with RIAs.

Southall, managing principal of the trade pub, stops short of calling out specific mutual fund shops or other RIA vendors who don't get it. Yet it does list some of the types of offenses. On the fundster side, Southall laments products that offer a "dog's dinner of commissions, fees and poor transparency and a sales process that makes the RIA wonder if the company rep stepped in from Mars -- or worse yet, Wall Street." He also attacks software providers who say "sales prospects" instead of "investors" and custodians "who suck up fees using crude banking methods of interest margin and revenue kickbacks with mutual fund providers while keeping such sausage innards out of the customers' sight."

On the flip side, Southall does praise two fund firms and some other vendors for their RIA friendly practices: DFA [profile] and Vanguard [profile], as well as Dynasty Financial Partners, Jemstep, MarketCounsel, Orion Advisor Services, Tamarac, and TD Ameritrade. Fundsters who are worried about where their RIA channel efforts are going wrong and are looking for ideas should read the full column. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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