BIDDING ADIEU TO ITS OWN ADVISER WEB: SCHWAB PARKS VAN, RIDES ON THE INTERNET

Showing how technology is moving faster than even Charles Schwab Corp., the San Francisco brokerage is disbanding the proprietary network that its financial adviser clients use to get customer information and to make transactions.

Just 10% of its 5,400 advisers don’t use the Internet, but rather an online system known as a VAN, for Value Added Network. The company wrote advisers that April 30 is the deadline to retrieve their files from the old system.

Schwab has used the network since 1989. It’s essentially “pre-Internet,” as Schwab spokesman Glen Mathison puts it.

The problem for one-modem advisers: They can’t have the Internet open at the same time as the VAN, which transmits data at a prehistorically sluggish (by webhead standards) 9.6 kilobits a second.

For most advisers speed alone was reason enough to start downloading from the web months ago. “You really had to slog through the old network,” says Anne Atkinson, an adviser with Seton/Smoke Capital Management, a San Francisco firm that manages $280 million.

Still, some advisers are dismayed.

Ron Bartosh Jr., an adviser with Yanni Bilkey Asset Planning Inc. in Pittsburgh, which oversees $250 million, says he likes the new system, except at the end of the month, during heavy file usage, when his Internet browser often crashes. He says that Schwab had warned him that downloads work better with a Netscape browser than with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which he uses.

Laura Boxer, an adviser in Berkeley, Calif., who manages $25 million, says she has mixed feelings about the change. “This morning, when I tried downloading some files, it didn’t work” — twice. She eventually gave up and used the VAN.

“I suppose the handwriting is on the wall in terms of the direction in which things are going,” she says. “Mostly the new system works.”