Three Crowns Mixtape: April 1, 2022
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Important financial industry news + marketing insights + good music.
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It’s April Fools’ Day – the one day a year you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Whether you’re a prankster or just unlucky prey, there’s one thing we know is no joke: WealthTech Madness 2022 ends today at noon – so go get your votes in!
And then come back to check out our adorable puppies (and our fresh #fintech news!) 😜
Must-Read Financial Industry & Marketing Articles
It’s Puppy Love Week at Three Crowns
Johnny’s dog, Dewey, turned one this week, and our designer Connor got a new puppy named Moose. 🐕
👆 Dewey at his b-day bash!
👆 This little guy is Moose!
WealthTech Madness 2022 is Wrapping Up – Cast Your Final Votes!
Our annual WealthTech Madness is coming to a close, and it’s down to the wire for our two finalists. With Snappy Kraken versus Riskalyze in this final faceoff, who will take home the championship title?
You decide. Get your final votes in by 12 p.m. CDT today to support your favorite fintech platform – and stay tuned for the results!
Skience Pits Itself Against Marty Byrde
Opening new accounts is kind of a sucky process, but WealthTech platform Skience has been doing a lot of work lately to make the entire process suck a lot less.
Its latest development is an integration with Electronic Verification Systems, or EVS for short.
The short story is that advisors can forgo manually checking to see if a new client is doing anything with their money that’s a bit nefarious – like, you know, laundering it for the cartel or something.
EVS runs client information through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) lists at the time of opening a new account, instead of saving that step for later when something might get missed, or it becomes a hassle for an advisory firm.
Not a great thing for Marty Byrde, maybe, but definitely a good thing for advisory firms.
Don’t Be Suspicious, Don’t Be Suspicious 👀
Massachusetts Dikembe Mutombos the Fiduciary Rule
Remember the DOL Rule? That came and went pretty fast.
And then Reg BI came around after the DOL rule, and that actually happened.
But through all these starts and stops, Massachusetts has been trying to do its own thing. It adopted a fiduciary standard tougher than Reg BI – but now, that’s DOA just like the DOL rule.
In a battle between Robinhood and the Massachusetts Secretary of State, the winner is apparently Robinhood for now. A judge this week invalidated the state’s fiduciary rule, saying the Secretary of State exceeded his authority with it.
We’ve linked to Michael Kitces’ Twitter take on the news, because his perspective will be much more refined and nuanced than our hot take.
Click the link to read more about how this could impact broker-dealers and advisors, and why rules like this might not even be necessary if we just applied current laws a little bit better.
How Earned Media can Impact Your Business Goals
One of the most powerful things you can do to improve your standing in Google results is to get backlinks (check out our new “Advisor’s Guide to Links” to learn more), and one of the surest ways to do that is with earned media.
Earned media can be a guest post you publish for another site or a media mention in the form of a passing reference to your firm in an article. Either instance will likely come with a backlink to your site, and backlinks are like Google gold.
We love Influence & Co.’s blog for their practical content marketing tips, and this piece doesn’t disappoint. They go into how you can measure the impact of earned media, and share the difference it’s made for their company.
Didn’t Walt Whitman Write a Poem About How Gross Linkedin has Gotten?
If you’re using Linkedin for outreach, then okay, I guess that’s one way to do things. If you’re using automated messaging services, then you should probably know that’s against the rules and could get you kicked off the platform.
But this..this is next level. NPR did a little social media sleuthing and found that companies are creating fake profiles with AI-generated pictures to do automated outreach. They’re not spreading disinformation, they just want to know if you would like to increase efficiency at your place of business.
If you answer yes, you get connected with a real salesperson. I guess it’s a workaround so your sales team doesn’t have to have their profiles besmirched by sending these desperate pleas?
Really, it’s just another layer of separation between a company and the responsible party, which is how the corporate world operates these days. NPR reached out to the companies sending these messages and the companies themselves didn’t know it was happening (at least that’s what they claimed).
I mean, I don’t know why I’m surprised. The world of automated marketing knows even less about Business Ethics than Billy Madison. These companies don’t worry about whether they should do something – if they can, they will.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This kind of outreach is the equivalent of setting your personal brand on fire. The world is too much with us.
A Salesperson By Any Other Name Is…A Salesperson
Stick That in Your Swipe File: Copywriting Power Words
WordStream released a list of copywriting “power words” this week. Honestly not sure what that means, but this will be a handy list to pull up the next time you’re staring at a cursor for 10 minutes trying to come up with a headline.
Give a Company a Break, California
Remember the California Consumer Privacy Act? Probably not. It concerns the information companies can store when tracking website visitors. It was all pretty straightforward, but in an opinion released this week, California’s attorney general said that any “inference” a company makes about users based on their digital footprint must also be disclosed to users upon request.
You probably have a plugin/tool of some sort that handles your website’s cookie preferences, so take a minute to just verify that the company is keeping up with the evolving opinions of our friends out west.
🎶California Cookies, They’re Undeniable 🎶
Here’s what we’ve been listening to this week.
Zach McDonald, President & CMO
“Been jamming a lot of King Gizzard this week.”
Johnny Sandquist, Founder & CEO
“Liked this song for a while and just figured out who sings it this week.”
Connor Brandt, Graphic Designer
“To keep with this week’s theme.”
Justine Young, Content Writer
“I’m signing up for twitter just to read Miki Fiki’s occasional thoughts on reality television and capitalism.”
Keep up with all of our picks of the week over time with the Three Crowns Mixtape on Spotify.
Click here to check it out and favorite it to add it to your collection.