Newsletters

President's Corner

Stacey Godwin, AUG President

A. Montag & Associates

I hope everyone is enjoying an exciting start to 2012. I know it’s going to be a great year and I’m looking forward to serving the membership as this year’s AUG President.

With the close of 2011 and ushering in of a new year, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Ed Wright for serving as president last year and as a board member for a number of years. Ed’s long commitment to this organization has resulted in some very exciting things and his leadership will be missed. I also want to thank outgoing board members - Jeremy Yowell and Rose Bennett - for their service and commitment to the AUG. And last but definitely not least, the organization certainly couldn’t function without our wonderful staff members, Erin Kestner and Colleen Coco, whose hard work and dedication to the AUG is always appreciated!

As we embark on a new year, I want to share several goals and initiatives. First, we’re hoping to forge ahead with the momentum that was created last year within the AUG/Advent relationship committees. read more...

In This Issue

President's Corner
APX Relationship Committee Report
2012 Event Calendar Published
Follow Up to Custodial Data & Reconciliation Discussion
AUG Update

What's New

Q1 Member Meetings: Houston (2/22), Atlanta (2/24), San Francisco (3/15), St. Louis (3/20), Boca Raton (3/22)
Q2 Member Meetings: Cincinnati (4/26), Chicago (5/9), Boston (5/17), Denver (5/22), Seattle (5/24), New York (6/7), Minneapolis (6/21)

APX Relationship Committee Report - The Survey

APX Relationship Committee Members

Amy Cowen, Jeff Huse, Tim Luchsinger, & John Stiles

The AUG APX Relationship Committee, a subcommittee of the AUG Advent Relationship Committee, was established in 2010. The committee’s main goal is to communicate APX user needs and desired functionality to Advent APX Product Developers as a larger and single voice. But, the committee members also monitor the APX forum on the AUG website to make sure members’ posts are answered. Additionally, committee members attend different regional meetings, roundtables, and conferences to interact with APX users to gather helpful information. Finally, the committee members coordinates a survey to determine the most important and relevant issues to AUG APX users, which are shared and used as a basis for discussion with Advent APX Product Managers.

The Survey

One of the biggest achievements of the subcommittee was devising the 2011 APX User Survey. The committee members developed a list of APX user themes and issues. The survey used question formats that could help rank the importance of these issues. Surveys were distributed and answered by individuals designated as the member firms head.

2012 Event Calendar Published

Check the website for the 2012 Event Calendar where you can find a listing of the 20 Member Meetings scheduled to be hosted in cities across the country. Be sure to sign up early online to attend the event in your area - or venture out to attend an event in another region. All events are open to member firms to attend free of charge.

Welcome to Your Arsenal

What's in your arsenal? Consider contributing an article about your tips, tricks or best practice for inclusion in a future edition. Feedback surveys indicate members want to hear from "you" - fellow users!

Follow Up to Custodial Data & Reconciliation Discussion

The ACD/DTCC/Rex sub-committee hosted the December 2011 AUG monthly web conference call titled Custodial Data & Reconciliation Discussion. Jeff Gowan and Colby Payne, Advent product managers, also joined the sub-committee members on the call. The panelists discussed various workflows surrounding the ACD, DTCC and Rex products along with some alternative workflows utilizing ByAllAccounts and even a custom database that was developed to use for reconciliation in conjunction with Rex. Below are some of the questions that were submitted during the call. The first set of questions was answered by Jeff Gowan at Advent and the second set was addressed by the sub-committee members.

Set 1: Answered by Jeff Gowan, Advent Software

Topic: "Fidelity Late files"

Response: I checked with our Interface Manager and on average Fidelity files are ready between 4:00 and 5:30 EST. I include that range because we process multiple jobs for different sets of Fidelity files, so different clients may see different times. We did have an issue recently with late price files but I believe that was resolved that day and was not a re-occurring issue. I know there were a couple of clients who wrote in their files arrived today at 7:12, or 7:15. We can follow up individually to see what happened with those files.

Topic: "Sometimes, Schwab files don't come through at all until we call to Advent and ask them to push it through."

AUG Update - Election, Focus Groups & Forums

Welcome New Members to the Board of Directors

Congratulations to the following members who won election to the 2012 Board of Directors and will each serve a three year term in office:

Tom Harmke, Reaves Asset Management
John Stiles, Birch Hill Investment Advisors
Cathy Zehr, Summit Investment Partners

Focus Groups

To connect users and foster more focused discussion on specific topics, the following focus groups were formed and are being spearheaded by volunteer members:

APX CRM Users - led by Amy Cowen at David Vaughan Investments
Alternative Investments & Partner - led by Aimee Hauff of Cornerstone Advisors and Cynthia Perez of Performance Trust
Reporting - led by Alan Slaughter of Athena Capital Advisors
Billing - TBD

We appreciate those members who stand up and take an active role in helping lead this user community and deliver valuable member services!

Discussion Forums

The "Partner" Discussion Forum on the website has been officially renamed the "Alternative Investments & Partner" Discussion Forum to provide a forum for the focus group to continue interacting between its regularly scheduled calls. All members are welcome to contribute to the discussion!

Forum Email Subscriptions

Members may have also noticed changes to the forum subscription email messages that are sent to all subscribers of the forums. The format of the messages has been simplified and now includes the entire content of an original post's text instead of lengthy posts being truncated. We hope these changes improve your user experience. If you have not already done so, visit the Forums webpage and click on "Manage Forum Subscriptions" to sign up and start receiving email notifications in your inbox. It is a handy way to stay on top of the member discussions.

SPONSORSHIP & ADVERTISING DISCLAIMER

As a courtesy to its members and to subsidize member services, AUG provides opportunities for companies with products and/or services marketed to member firms to advertise with and sponsor events held by AUG. Acceptance of sponsorship or advertising dollars from companies by AUG does not constitute an endorsement of that company’s products or services.

2012 PREMIER SPONSORS

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