June 18, 2012

By Louis P. Stanasolovich, CFP^®, CCO, CEO, Founder and President of Legend Financial Advisors, Inc.^® and Emerging Wealth Investment Management, Inc.

This year's annual Pershing INSITE conference was a big hit with advisors as well as exhibitors. On Wednesday, June 6th former President Bill Clinton was the opening keynote speaker for more than 2,500 attendees at the conference which was held at the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. President Clinton took center stage, where he addressed the growing challenges of globalization. The conference was host to several other prominent speakers, such as Deepak Chopra, the founder of the Chopra Foundation. Chopra's session entitled "The Soul of Leadership" focused on what it takes to become a great leader. In addition to several keynote speakers and education sessions, the conference included many important announcements.

Pershing LLC, of BNY Mellon Company announced the release of a new guidebook, Generation X and Y Investors Are the Future of Your Business. The book highlights the importance of connecting to Generation X ages 32 to 47, and Generation Y who is anyone under the age of 31. They claim these generations often mistrust financial organizations, and the new guidebook urges financial organizations to act with assertiveness, and urgency to claim their share of this much smaller but extremely important pool of clientele.

Jim Crowley, Pershing's Chief Relationship Officer who during the keynote session entitled "Pershing's Strategy to Support Your Success" endorsed the new guidebook, and conveyed the importance of acquiring a younger generation of clientele. Crowley stated that the only way to insure your success is to acquire a strong clientele, and then maintain that clientele. He advised investors to maintain their clientele by targeting specific markets. Crowley, along with the entire Pershing organization, believes strongly that the younger generation of clientele is the current target market. Crowley insisted that smart investors would capitalize now.

During the conference the folks at Pershing also announced that they now offer Section 529 college savings plans on its platform, making it the first clearing firm to offer such services. "The 529 College Savings plan is currently one of the most popular college saving vehicles for American families, and is expected to reach as much as $237 billion in assets by 2015, according to the Financial Research Corporation," said Rob Cirrotti Director of Retirement and Long Term Savings at Pershing.

Day two of the conference led to more ground-breaking announcements for Pershing who unveiled their newly improved NetExchange Client®, their investor access platform. The next generation NetExchange Client® platform enables financial organizations and their investment professionals to provide their clients a user-friendly, informational, and feature-rich investor software platform that integrates seamlessly with their own systems. Lucille Myer, co-CIO of Pershing stated with much fanfare, "We are committed to giving investment professionals the tools to service the needs of their clients and position themselves for success". She also stated, "The next generation of our NetExchange Client® platform was developed based on feedback from investment professionals and detailed research about how investors access and leverage their account information online."

While the majority of sessions at the Pershing conference focused on how advisors could cater to their clients, Brian Shea, Chief Executive Officer of Pershing, who led The State of the Industry and Pershing session, centered his presentation around how advisors need to increase the focus on clients. Increased focus on clients would benefit the industry as a whole. He insisted that by thinking outside of the box and utilizing new tools, this would help advisors improve the services they offer to the next generation of clients.

The conference closed with a panel discussion entitled "A View From the Top" moderated by Michael McKee, Co-Host of the Bloomberg Radio Show. The panel discussion included remarks from Curtis Arledge, CEO of BNY Mellon Investment Management, Todd Boehly, President of Guggenheim Investments, and Robert Leary, President and COO for ING Insurance U.S. More than 2,500 advisory professionals were in attendance, making it one of the most heavily attended advisory industry conferences this year.

For additional information on the conference, please visit www.pershing.com.