I last spoke with Eric Clarke, President and CEO of Orion Advisor Services, at the TD Ameritrade Institutional 2012 Conference on his company’s integration with Veo® Open Access.
In my latest conversation with Clarke at the T3 Conference, he provides an overview how Orion delivers value-add services beyond performance reporting, including e-signautre support, rebalancing and trading engines, account billing, web portals, branded mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Advisers, particulary those who manage portfolios in an active fashion, are no strangers to portfolio analytics software. Several popular tools such as Morningstar Principia and AdvisoryWorld have been industry staples for years.
But a new portfolio analysis system came to my attention at the T3 conference in February called StatPro Revoluition. It’s a cloud-based portfolio analytics platform aimed at delivering consolidated, visually-appealing reports to both advisers and clients on demand.
I sat down with Andrew Peddar, CEO of North America at StatPro, to get his take on how StatPro is positioned relative to the competition in the analytics segment.
How do financial advisers set aside more time to work with clients? One way is by outsourcing activities that aren’t client facing.
Here in this Video Spotlight, I speak with AssetBook President and CEO Rob Major about the benefits of hiring an outsourced portfolio service bureau. As you’ll hear from Major, options for advisers might not be as expensive as one might think, and the efficiencies and data accuracy to be gained are fairly substantial.
Hot off the wires this morning (and perhaps coincidentally timed with this week’s T3 conference?), Envestnet announced it will buy Tamarac, Inc., the Seattle-based provider of integrated wealth management software for RIAs, for $54 million in cash.
Click here to view the press release on TheStreet.com
In a statement, Tamarac CEO Stuart DePina said, “We are excited to build on the momentum Tamarac has generated with independent RIA’s seeking to streamline their operations through integrated technology and outsourced services. Now that we can leverage Envestnet’s solutions, Tamarac will accelerate many aspects of our strategic initiatives while allowing us to focus on our client’s needs.”
I’m attending the T3 conference today through Saturday, and have some time blocked off to interview Brandon Rembe, CTO of Tamarac this Friday. I’ll be sure to ask what this means for Tamarac’s clients and post the video shortly thereafter (so you might want to subscribe to the FPPad YouTube channel while you’re there).
Tamarac’s integrated platform expands connections to popular document management software applications.
In a press release today, Seattle-based Tamarac Inc. announced the first wave of integration partners for the latest iteration of its platform for advisers, Advisor® Xi.
Click here to read the full release on PRNewswire.
Three popular document management software applications headline the integration, with support announced for Laserfiche® from Cities Digital, Worldox® from Trumpet, and NetDocuments®. In addition to the document management integrations, Advisor Xi will also include integrations with Laser App for online form submissions, MoneyGuidePro™ for financial planning, ByAllAccounts® for account aggregation, and Rackspace for hosted Microsoft Exchange®.
Matt Stroh, VP of Marketing at Tamarac said in the press release, “Partnering with these first-class vendors represents Tamarac’s commitment to taking integration to the next level. Together, we will offer a complete best-of-breed platform that will give financial advisors greater opportunities to replace manual processes with fully automated workflows that span across multiple, integrated products.”
Yet another integration announced by Orion Advisor Services this week is one with AdvisoryWorld, enabling access to the reporting company’s extensive library of fact sheets, analytics, and comparison tools.
AdvisoryWorld provides a large universe of reports, all supported by data sourced from Lipper, Morningstar, Standard and Poor’s and Zacks Investment Research. For a comprehensive view of AdvisoryWorld’s report options, see their PDF by clicking the following link: http://www.advisoryworld.com/ice/AdvisoryWorld_Sample_Reports_Full.pdf
Sample Report from AdvisoryWorld
Michael Wilson, Chief Operating Officer of AdvisoryWorld, said that the company is finalizing a reseller agreement with Orion over the next week, so the integration should be available to Orion users shortly. Pricing starts at $45 per month per advisor for AdvisoryWorld’s basic reporting module and $95 per month per advisor for an extended version.
With the integration active, advisors using Orion’s platform will be able to automatically pass position and holding information from Orion into AdvisoryWorld. There won’t be any need to re-key position information in order to generate reports with up-to-date holding information.
After a fantastic afternoon of activities including a golf tournament and a tour of the Denver Botanical Gardens, attendees of the Gemini + Orion Advisor Forum looked forward to the final day of sessions.
Prior to departing for outdoor activities, Orion provided an update of their Advisor Desktop suite, including a discussion of enhanced performance screens, end-to-end trading processes, and new integration with the Dropbox cloud file sharing and synchronization service.
Enhanced Performance Screens
New additions to the performance screens include two “gadgets,” where performance can be displayed using heat maps or bar graphs. The heat maps are a very slick addition, where they show performance information in shades of red and green (much like the daily return grid on the MorningstarAdvisor.com homepage), and can be configured to show performance by style, model, account, household group, and more.
Dropbox Integration
Big Guns at the Orion Advisor Tech Panel
During the Tech Panel discussion, Orion revealed that its working on an integration with the popular cloud file storage service Dropbox. Orion president Eric Clarke commented that its the company’s first attempt at supporting such a service and aims to simplify the process of sharing documents and information between Orion’s service team and their advisor clients.
Advisors who currently use Dropbox with their clients for other purposes may be able to leverage this new integration and deliver certain reports and data generated from within the Orion system directly to the end client’s shared folder.
Look for the Dropbox integration to be available in the next major release, scheduled for December 2011.
In his State of the Company address to Orion Advisor Forum attendees, Orion president Eric Clarke announced that the company will be releasing an integration with Salesforce/AppCrown CRM by December of this year.
Orion president Eric Clarke
The announcement wrapped up a series of highlights how Orion is investing in its own business and in the business of its advisor clients.
New for Orion this year is a hardened server facility in Nebraska, an eProfile system designed to streamline the account creation paperwork process, and an Advisor Voice feature on the web, where advisors can submit their votes on top desired features they’d like to see released in the future.
At the conclusion of his address, Clarke described Orion’s vision to fully integrate the Advisor Desktop platform into the Salesforce/AppCrown platform by January 2013. This, according to Clarke, will allow advisors to manage major components of their business, including CRM, portfolio management, billing, and trading, all from within the CRM environment.
As afternoon thunderstorms rolled off the Rocky Mountains, the Gemini + Orion Advisor Forum 2011 officially kicked off in Denver, Colo.
According to Kyle Hiatt, VP of Business Development for Orion Advisor Services, I’m attending the event with roughly 300 other clients, prospects, and interested parties of Gemini Fund Services and Orion. The majority of my time over the next few days will be spent on the portion of sessions conducted by Orion.
Tech Lab
Orion’s session today featured a Tech Lab, open to any and all who wanted to learn more about the platform, see new features demonstrated, and interact with many of the engineering and support staff on site. What impressed me about the Tech Lab was its light footprint.
The Orion Advisor Services Tech Lab
There were five lab stations in all, running off of either 11″ MacBook Air ultra-portable laptops or 13″ MacBook Pros, each connected to 27″ Apple Cinema Display monitors. The occasional iPad made an appearance as well to demo Orion’s mobile app.
All systems were running Orion’s Advisor Desktop portfolio management system through the Citrix Receiver application. The Orion Web Access components were demonstrated on Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Three of the five Macs were running Lion, the latest version of the Mac operating system.
The conference facility did provide a hard-wired Internet connection for the Tech Lab, though a local Wi-Fi network was created to connect the MacBook Air laptops to the Internet.
Nevertheless, it was quite impressive to see how Orion’s platform (in use by firms that manage billions of dollars) could run off a laptop computer that fits inside an inter-office envelope. It really demonstrates the power and flexibility of hosted services and the cloud computing model.
As with most conferences today, attendees are encouraged to share their thoughts via social media. Forum tweets are tagged with #GOAF11 and the official Twitter account for the event is @AdvisorForum.
I look forward to attending sessions over the next two days covering many of the new features and additions to the Orion platform and will update FPPad as time permits.
Just in to our wires is a press release from Advent Software, Inc., a provider of portfolio and financial management software to advisers. They just announced an agreement to purchase Jacksonville, Fla.-based Black Diamond Performance Reporting for approximately $73 million.
Click here to read the full press release at MarketWire.com
“Together, we believe Advent and Black Diamond can be even better, faster, and stronger, and we’re proud to add this powerful new alternative for advisors to our family of purpose-built solutions,” said Advent President Peter Hess.
We want to congratulate Black Diamond Founder and CEO Reed Colley and his entire team on the acquisition and look forward to continued efficiencies available to advisers as a result of the purchase.
