It's easy to forget, as we stare at screens for upwards of 12 hours per day and do everything from paying bills to ordering food with our phones, that not everything happens via technological means. You may be surprised to know that if you had a lot of money to invest — say, $500,000 more more — and used the services of a registered investment advisor, you'd likely get much of your information from them in the form of long, printed-out analyses.
This is just the way things have always been done in this part of the financial industry, and though banks and hedge funds and other money managers have embraced our new web-based, on demand, mobile culture, many RIAs haven't. That's changing though, because those very people who have spent years putting together five-page analyses to discuss with clients once or twice a year are doing a 180 and building their own web applications. Turns out, those banks and other firms that have already created apps take a long time to do it, so in a way, RIAs are at an advantage — they waited until many of the kinks were worked out on the tech side, and now they're ready to adapt tech tools to their needs.
One very cool example of this is Oranj, which was created by an RIA called Main Street Financial. I wrote about them this week for Institutional Investor - check out the story and let me know what you think!