Jon Patullo Discussing The Td Ameritrade Institutional Veo® Open Access Initiative

>> WINTERBERG: Hi there, I’m Bill Winterberg, Technology Editor for Morningstar Advisor. I’m here with Jon Patullo, Managing Director of Technology Product Management. John, TD Ameritrade Institutional is really making a big splash with its Veo® Open Access initiative and a lot of its integration partners that are here on the exhibit hall. Tell me a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes with the Open Access team and the team that you’ve assembled and how they’re able to take advisor feedback and push it into this platform that helps them meet their needs. >> PATULLO: Really listening to our advisors is something we live and breathe every day. We continuously listen to our advisors to provide solutions, and our advisors have been telling us that they want to have an open, flexible platform that they can leverage their existing systems to gain efficiencies. So – it’s very time-consuming and costly to switch systems, so they want to be able to have an open platform, and that’s exactly what we’ve built with Veo® Open Access. And we’ve really assembled a solid team, and it’s helped put together where we have over 30 different Open Access providers here today demonstrating their integrations with Veo®. So working with over 55 different vendors at this point, it really helped achieve, you know, integration and really moved the industry forward. >> WINTERBERG: It’s been very impressive to see how many vendors are here on site. One of the exhibitors really receiving a lot of attention from advisors are your electronic signature providers. Tell me a little bit about the testing that you’ve done on e-signature to help roll that out to advisors, especially to those who are concerned about their clients who may or may not acclimate really well to this electronic signature platform. >> PATULLO: So we’ve been testing this out for a while, and we really have five different ways that advisors can leverage e-signature with us. One is through our Veo® platform, so directly from Veo® for their existing clients, you know, all that data easily passes the DocuSign where they can electronically send it off to their clients to sign the documents. We’ve also leveraged Laser App who integrates with over 60 different providers. You know, we have an integration directly with Laser App to DocuSign for TD Ameritrade clients. We’ve also allowed advisors to use DocuSign directly, so a lot of them like the functionality DocuSign has today so they can fill forms out there and send them off electronically to clients as well. And we’ve also made that part of Open Access, so all the technology providers that we have on Veo® Open Access can leverage the DocuSign API to build integrations within their systems to open accounts with TD Ameritrade, so we’re seeing some success with that with a lot of firms. I think we have two firms right now that have already built to that. A lot of other firms are very interested. We’ve also made it, you know, even more flexible to add it to – advisors can add it to their websites, so they can build in the process within their website to allow clients just to go to their website to fill in information to sign the account applications as well. >> WINTERBERG: That’s great. I’m really excited about what you’ve been able to put together already, so put your thinking cap on and think ahead to six months or 12 months. When you get your team together and you have your strategic meetings, what gets you really excited about what’s in store for advisors as TD Ameritrade Institutional moves forward for the next year? >> PATULLO: Yeah, we’re actually, you know, in the next few weeks we’re having a technology summit meeting really to meet with a lot of the vendors that are a part of Open Access really to help shape the future of the technology platform, and the feedback we’ve been getting from the partners so far has been great, you know, it allows us to continue to build a road map and make sure that it’s going meet the needs of our advisors. So some of the things that we’re going to talk about is, you know, again, how to create additional efficiencies, you know, leverage workflows within a lot of Veo® Open Access providers as well, and provide advisors with, you know, tools to be more efficient in their practice. >> WINTERBERG: That’s great. Thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions today, and again, thank you for putting together such a great event, and I’m looking forward to what you have in store for advisors in the future. >> PATULLO: Thank you. I appreciate it.