The day is finally here and Charles Schwab’s IMPACT 2019 is underway. More than 4,600 attendees, including more than 2,200 financial advisors, have converged in San Diego to get the latest updates around investing, financial planning and product development initiatives. And while the conference is still in its initial phases, IMPACT is already living up to its moniker as the must-attend event for the financial advisory industry.

Several keynote speeches from top leaders at Schwab, as well as a few other leading authorities in behavioral finance, kicked off the conference. At the same time, IMPACT continued its tradition of unveiling several new pieces of advising tech that could have potentially big implications for the advising community. This includes several leading platforms and their integration into Schwab’s own offerings.

Finally, day one of IMPACT included discussions around advisor M&A and growth strategies. All in all, while many vendors were still setting up their wares and the conference was just getting started, already IMPACT is proving to be a great learning environment for advisors.
 
Check our Schwab IMPACT 2019 Channel to catch the latest updates from the event.

Kicking off IMPACT was Schwab’s own team in discussing global politics and the effects of it on portfolios in its The Markets, the World and Your Clients panel. Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Strategist Liz Ann Sonders was joined by global strategist Jeffrey Kleintop in a discussion on the state of the U.S. and international economy. In a recently published research report, Sonders already dove into the “split personality” and bifurcation of the U.S. economy – with its mixed consumer and business-related data. Attendees received valuable insight into the world’s events and how they are shaping investment returns.

Schwab has historically been a place to find great insight on behavioral finance topics and day one continued this trend with an extended workshop from Jay Mooreland. The Emotional Investor and founder of The Behavioral Finance Network led a talk on how to craft a behavioral policy statement to use with clients. The idea is to prevent irrational and emotional decisions while building a portfolio and staying the course.

IMPACT has long been a top event for service providers to announce new planning products and day one didn’t disappoint. This included leading data visualization provider YCharts. The investment research and analytics firm announced that its tools would be available through a new single sign-on via the Schwab Advisor Center platform. Likewise, advisor billing and payment platform AdvicePay also announced that it had joined Schwab Advisor Services’ new single sign-on platform.

Don’t forget to read the Q&A with Sean Brown, CEO of YCharts here. to know more about the company’s upcoming product launches.
 
Perhaps the biggest splash was made by Orion Advisor Solutions, which made several new product launches. This included further time-saving integrations into Schwab’s platform that eliminate manual data entry across systems as well as the first forays into direct indexing through its ASTRO portfolio optimizer. Orion highlighted the tax-loss harvesting potential of the new system and Schwab’s free trading ecosystem.
 
Finally, IMPACT has also been a top place to find information on growing an advisor practice and M&A trends within the industry. Through a newly launched study commissioned by BlackRock called The RIA Deal Room, attendees learned how the M&A market is responding to rapidly changing RIA demographics. Moreover, the study was a first, as it used data to understand the relationship between price and terms for successful M&A transactions in the sector.

With day one in the books, Schwab IMPACT is already living up to its hype. While the conference is just getting started, we’ve already seen some exciting new product launches and announcements, as well as some key information for advisors. Day two promises to be just as exciting as the conference picks up steam.