FeeCheck and CommissionCheck integrated into Morningstar Advisor Workstation

In this week’s Tech Update column I go on at some length about the new partnership Morningstar Inc. has with PriceMetrix whereby the latter firm’s collected and anonymized fee pricing and commission pricing can be pulled up from within Advisor Workstation.
“One out of every three domestic advisers accesses Advisor Workstation”, said Nick VanDerSchie, who heads up the software group for Morningstar’s captive-broker-dealer channel, during a demo last week.
When version 2.0 of Workstation rolled out back in March 2010, it was licensed by more than 120 firms and could be found on the screens of more than 148,000 individual advisers by Morningstar’s count. I suspect that number has only grown since.
Again, each broker-dealer will have to sign up separately (and pay extra) to get access to the tools but the integrations are built so that Morningstar can flip the switch for those firms pretty quickly and have them up and running.
The two screenshots I have included in this post zoom in on the pop-up screens that you, as an adviser getting access to the new integration, would see when opening the CommissionCheck or FeeCheck tools from within Advisor Workstation.
See the two shots in the online version of the column for the context of where you would be opening the tools from within Workstation.
“We are the only source for this type of market information,” said Greg Durand, head of marketing at PriceMetrix.
Morningstar’s Mr. VanDerSchie chimed back in to remind me that a core part of his company’s business is based around selling both software solutions and analytics and that the data from PriceMetrix represented a perfect fit.
“There is a huge amount of interest in this data and we consider it a scarce resource,” he added.
As interesting and potentially beneficial as I could see this data being I do wonder whether broker-dealers are going to be buying the Workstation version that includes it.
I will be relying on all my adviser contacts and sources to keep me apprised of the uptake.
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