"Be Bold," counseled Jim McCool, the executive VP who oversees Schwab Institutional Services, to a packed auditorium in the official opening session at Schwab Impact 2010 in Boston. McCool and Bernie Clark, who heads Schwab's Advisor Services custodial platform for advisors, welcomed the audience of advisors, vendors and press—nearly 3,700 people are attending the conference—on Wednesday morning.
Clark announced that Schwab had selected Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamic CRM and Junxure as three centerpieces of advisor technology that Schwab would integrate onto its technology platform on behalf of advisors that custody their clients' assets with Schwab.
Those three companies are the first partners that Schwab Advisor Services (SAS) has chosen, guided by advice from its RIAs, as part of its "intelligent integration" platform that was described by Neesha Hathi, VP of Advisor Technology Solutions (SAS) for Schwab, in a prior Weekend Interview on AdvisorOne.com
The strategy behind intelligent integration was addressed by Clark (left) in an exclusive interview that formed the basis for Investment Advisor's cover story for November 2010.
With that advisor-specific piece of business announced, the opening session of the annual Schwab conference turned to a conversation by Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Schwab, with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the financial crisis and his recent book "On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System."
A 'Contained' Crisis?
Paulson (below) noted that, early on, as the Bush Administration was wooing him to come to Washington, he repeatedly said "no." But when he finally did say yes, it was his mother's reaction that he said was the best: "It was one of the few times I'd seen her cry…she didn't take calls for a while."
Sonder
s asked why, early in the crisis, had Paulson and many others said that the crisis would be "contained." Paulson answered that the "biggest miss" was that since "World War II" there hadn't been a "really steep decline in residential housing."
"I knew there were excesses," Paulson said—adding that he'd felt the country was, "long overdue to have a financial crisis."
