Corporate Insight's 2015 Monitor Awards are out! The awards honor financial services firms for excellence in the online user experience they offer prospects, clients and advisors. Throughout the month of February, we will be releasing a series of slide decks highlighting the firms that received Gold Monitor Awards. Each of the nine slide decks will focus on a specific industry within financial services. The Advisor Monitor Awards are given out across five categories: Advisor Homepage Navigation Practice Management Resources Literature Order Systems Best New Tool The slide deck highlights the Gold Monitor Award winning firms in each category and explains why their online offerings were best in class.

1. 2015 Award Winners
Gold Monitor Awards
ADVISOR MONITOR

2. AboutUs
Corporate Insight provides competitive intelligence and user experience research to
the nation’s leading financial institutions. For over 20 years, the firm has tracked
technological developments in the financial services industry, identifying best
practices in online banking and investing, online insurance, mobile finance, active
trading platforms, social media and other emerging areas. There are no assumptions
in Corporate Insight’s work – we use live accounts at all of the firms we research,
providing our clients with unparalleled, unbiased intelligence on the competition.
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Promote Your Firm’s 2015 Gold Monitor Awards!
Corporate Insight is happy to assist all Gold Monitor Award winning firms in promoting their honors.
For more information and to see examples of past promotions, contact us at PR@Corporateinsight.com.
Press Coverage

3. Corporate Insight is pleased to present our 14th annual Mutual Funds Advisor Monitor Awards report,
offering a broad benchmarking of the asset management industry across five key sectors: Advisor
Homepage, Navigation, Retirement Centers, Practice Management Resources, Literature Order Systems
and Best New Tool. This is the first year that Best New Tool is featured as an awards category.
As in past years, we reserve the Gold Medal for firms that present exceptional offerings within given
categories. We award a Silver Medal for features that offer similar value but lack some of the
outstanding attributes and functions of the best offerings. We give a Bronze Medal to firms that offer a
unique or noteworthy iteration but do not meet the highest standards for a given category.
AdvisorMonitorAwards
0 1 2 3 4
Putnam
PIMCO
Oppenheimer Funds
Lord Abbett
iShares
Hartford Funds
Franklin Templeton
Fidelity
BlackRock
American Funds
Allianz Global
Medal Count
Gold Silver Bronze

4. Advisor Homepage
Navigation
Practice Management Resources
CategoryOverview
Best New Tool
Literature Order Systems
Promote Your Firm’s 2015 Gold Monitor Awards!
Corporate Insight is happy to assist all Gold Monitor Award winning firms in promoting their honors.
For more information and to see examples of past promotions, contact us at PR@Corporateinsight.com.

5. Advisor homepages should provide access to main areas of interest while effectively promoting
commentary, thought leadership insights and products. We focus on different ways that firms promote
their content as well as how homepages are designed and laid out. Advisor homepages that feature
customizable options such as watch lists were rated more favorably. Homepages with responsive design
received extra points. We evaluated firms based on design and overall appearance, commentary
promotion, product promotion and news and events updates.
Fidelity earns its first advisor homepage gold
medal for its attractively designed homepage
that includes strong product promotions,
responsive design and customizable options.
The firm’s 2015 website revamp improved its
use of white space, navigation and product
focus. Fidelity’s homepage employs an
excellent balance of color, well-defined
sections, rich images and an effective white
background to highlight content. The
homepage effectively promotes topical
financial commentaries.
AdvisorHomepage

6. This category considers the user experience in progressing through websites, focusing on how the main
menu functions and provides access to different site features. We analyze how firms employ basic web
technologies like rollover capabilities and the use of breadcrumbs to facilitate location awareness. Our
updated grading criteria includes responsive design, main menu, supplemental navigation, link and
button affordance and search capabilities.
Fidelity receives the gold medal for its navigational
structure that boasts an advanced main menu, strong
search capabilities and consistent design principles
within pages. The site’s main navigational menu
stands out because it appears and dissolves quickly,
employs bold font and a clear color contrast between
categories, and offers promotions within the tab.
Flyout menus list second-level sections under each tab
in a bold white color, and each tab has an overview
page. As with other leaders in this report, the firm
highlights tabs that an advisor is viewing and includes
breadcrumbs and local menus to help keep advisors
oriented on the site.
Navigation

7. For practice management, we examine materials that asset managers provide for financial advisors to
build business and manage their operations. This ranges from tips for garnering referrals to advice on
incorporating new technology into a practice. We focus on several aspects of the practice management
experience including material accessibility, the breadth of topics addressed and any innovative or
interactive features included on the sites. Changes to firm rankings this year were primarily due to firm
enhancements. In evaluating this year’s resources, we looked for accessibility and centralization,
deliverables and actionable materials, topic range and innovative features.
Hartford Funds earns the top position for providing
advisors rich practice management resources.
Although the firm made no significant changes to its
practice management offerings since our last review,
this year we revised category criteria to place greater
importance on accessibility and the range of formats
materials provided. Resources are available in a
dedicated Practice Management section in the
Business Building tab. Hartford Funds’ practice
management topic units clearly define how materials
can be placed into practice, providing both insight
and actionable steps for advisors. Resources come in
a variety of formats including audio, video, PDFs,
slide decks and worksheets.
PracticeManagementResources

8. This category evaluates literature centers, focusing on best practices in the document ordering
experience. Efficient literature centers provide advisors with ample resources for practice management,
such as client-ready materials, including brochures, fund documents and forms. The extent to which
asset management firms are efficient and effective in distributing literature to advisors may play a large
role in the ability to attract and engage potential and current clients. In this category, we examine
accessibility, what kind of browsing capabilities are provided, shopping cart technology, order tracking
and literature descriptions. We favor firms with features like continually viewable carts, detailed
document descriptions, dynamic navigation controls with powerful search options and useful filters to
narrow down relevant results.
Franklin Templeton maintains its third consecutive
gold medal for this year’s advisor site revamp that
further enhanced the firm’s already-exemplary
literature system. Highlights of the literature order
system include a user-friendly shopping cart with
ubiquitous access, responsive design, advanced search
and filtering options and detailed item descriptions.
The literature section’s dedicated search field includes
a predictive search that generates both product and
keyword suggestions.
LiteratureOrderSystems

9. This year we introduce a category that rewards firms for introducing a new tool with which advisors can
serve clients and prepare for financial planning challenges they may face. The tool’s results can become
crucial conversation starters between financial professionals and clients. We considered all tools
released during the calendar year across all financial planning purposes (e.g., retirement, college
planning, portfolio construction). Our review evaluates the range of inputs required by tools as well as
the depth of analysis. Quality of results was a key focus, with points awarded to firms that provided a
clear breakdown of projected results in PDF reports. Tools accompanied with educational guides,
methodologies or other supplemental materials were viewed more favorably.
BlackRock’s iRetire earns our first ever Best New Tool
gold medal. This impressive software platform aims to
shift the conversation of preparing for retirement from
creating a nest egg to planning retirement incomes. The
tool employs robust analytical power through
proprietary BlackRock technology, including the firm's
CoRI retirement income indexes and risk analytics from
its Aladdin platform. iRetire boasts an attractive, tablet-
friendly interface as well as an impressive supply of
supporting resources. The tool is promoted and
accessible to registered advisors from a dedicated
Introducing iRetire page in the Financial Professionals
tab.
BestNewTool

10. 2015Top GoldMedalWinners
2 3
Fidelity
22
In the 2015 Advisor Monitor Awards, Fidelity leads with two
gold medals, leaving BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Harford
Funds each with one gold medal.

11. 646-929-5158
Efazekas@corporateinsight.com
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Erika Fazekas
Analyst
Advisor Monitor & Mutual Fund Monitor
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