Financial Advisory

The case for desktop sharing definitely adds up
Financial Advisors

Financial planning is a delicate business that makes a lot of demands on the clients. They have to trust the financial advisor whose advice will affect their life savings and their every hope and plan. They have to understand and choose among complex investment strategies. And they have to make time for all this while living busy lives.

With Mikogo, financial advisors can add clarity, convenience and trust to their relationships, supplementing in-person meetings with easy remote sessions that make sure all financial data on the client’s desktop and all the strategy information on the advisor’s, can be easily and securely shared — all through an advanced, yet easy-to-use, solution that saves time and money.

An Expert Opinion

Bill Winterberg is both a certified financial planner as well as a technology consultant, so his endorsement of Mikogo — he named it 2010′s best client-facing technology in his column at the Morningstar Advisor — isn’t made lightly.

“Mikogo is my favorite [desktop-sharing program] because it’s easy to use, requires no special software download, has robust features, including the transfer of keyboard and mouse control to session attendees,” he says. He uses Mikogo with his own financial advisor, who lives two time zones away.


“We did some 2010 year-end tax planning, but he doesn’t have access to my year-to-date personal and business income/expense information,” Winterberg says. “With Mikogo, I could show him all the reports I generated in real time from my personal and business accounting software on my computer. This allowed us to immediately identify strategies that could be implemented before the end of the year to maximize tax and retirement savings.”

A Relationship-Builder

Certified Financial Planner Richard Feight uses Mikogo to deepen relationships with a client base he keeps deliberately small so that he can focus on quality of service.

“A key part of building relationships is being flexible to their needs and having clear communication,” he says. “Mikogo allows both.”

Mikogo lets him securely share data between his desktop and the client’s, without the lag time of email exchanges or the inconvenience and expense of in-person meetings. “I’ve saved myself some really long trips in the car, which translates to me spending more time with my kids,” he says.


Working with the Best

Winterberg notes that slow adoption of electronic signatures means that some financial decisions can’t be finalized over a Mikogo session. “But even if a ‘wet’ signature is needed on a form, an occasional FedEx envelope is not a high cost to pay to satisfy that requirement,” he says. “Personally, I want to retain the services of the best advisor available, not just the advisor that lives close to me.”

With Mikogo in their arsenals, a lot of financial advisors will be making exactly that point.

To download the newest version, click here.

PDF Download the PDF version