Tech firm touts capabilities around electronic recordkeeping and retrieval. After talking about it for the past several months, document-management technology provider Laserfiche has at last released a version of its Intuition desktop software for independent investment advisors.

"Laserfiche has designed Intuition to help investment advisors minimize their paperwork and maximize their time and value to their customers," says Chris Wacker, head of business development at Long Beach, Calif.-based Laserfiche. "It's easy to install and simple to use."

It's a scanner

There are about 10,000 independent investment advisories managing something like $1.7 trillion in the U.S. today, according to Laserfiche.

"Many of these firms have sophisticated trading and portfolio management technology but still rely on paper documents and filing cabinets for their record-keeping, customer-reporting and compliance requirements," the technology provider says in a recent press release.

Kim Emperato, director of operations at Auburn, N.Y.-based accounting, accounting and financial-planning firm Cuddy Financial Services, says that document management has become a necessity to small firms like Cuddy "to increase business efficiencies and support that will bridge the gap for independent advisors and small firms who need the key features of the enterprise solutions used by large organizations, but without the investment and resources required to support those high-end products."

Document storage is also mandated for SEC-regulated RIAs and broker-dealers, though SEC and FINRA regulations say nothing about firms having to use technology to do it.

Here's the SEC's rule on Electronic Recordkeeping by Investments Companies and Investment Advisers and here's the FINRA -- formerly NASD -- rule on preserving records for broker-dealers.

Intuition is designed to capture, store and manage millions of document pages. Among its features, says Laserfiche, are capabilities for capturing and "digesting" high-quality scans quickly, conducting complex searches, redacting sensitive information, archiving documents from any software application, and flexibility for distributing documents electronically or in "hard" copy. -FWR

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