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Advisor Group Uses SunGard's Protegent Social Media Surveillance for Marketing Strategy

By Sujata Garud
TMCnet Contributor

Advisor Group has planned new strategy to communicate with its client. The company, with the use of SunGard’s Protegent Social Media Surveillance, is offering to develop a solution that will be housed on its proprietary VISION2020 Advisor Portal, a single sign-on website that provides advisors access to client account information, office automation, compliance and marketing tools, the cutting edge VISION2020 Wealth Management system for fee based advisors, personalized news, alerts and more. With the help of the technology, Advisor Group’s advisors can use social media to grow business while still remaining compliant with regulatory obligations.

In a press release, David Ballard, chief information officer at Advisor Group, said, “Social media sites have become a very powerful communications tool for today’s financial advisors. Last November we set out to create the most flexible, advisor-friendly and compliant social media offering in the industry and we considered many vendors over the last seven months to ensure we built the best solution for advisors. We’ve been piloting our offering with small focus groups since February and we are eager to launch our offering to all advisors.”

SunGard’s Protegent Social Media Surveillance solution will help Advisor Group to enforce internal social media policies and manage supervisory regulatory requirements. The technology will enable Advisor Group to monitor and archive advisors’ content posted to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (News - Alert). Protegent’s alerting, reporting and pre-approval workflow will help Advisor Group proactively adhere to FINRA books and records surveillance requirements.

Art Metzger, vice president of Advertising Supervision at Advisor Group, said, “Whether administrative related posts, securities related tweets, or marketing and communications messages, we will train advisors on how to leverage social media and better market themselves to clients and prospects. Incorporating Protegent’s social media offering into VISION2020 Advisor Portal means advisors benefit from single sign-on access to Facebook, LinkedIn (News - Alert) and Twitter. This allows our advisors to seamlessly make social media marketing a part of their daily routine, without sacrificing the time they need to be spending on other client-facing activities.”

SunGard was recently in the news when it extended its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert))-based market connectivity to NYSE BondMatch, the European Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF).

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Sujata Garud is a TMCnet freelancer with three years of writing/editing experience and two years of market research experience. As an editor she has covered the IT, electronics, banking, pharma, construction, mining and healthcare industries. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell