In | West 2018: Ian McKenna

Established in Sydney in 2013 and now also operating in the US and Europe, Practifi aims to deliver a new form of technology platform for advice businesses to run the whole organisation, not just part of it. This is a business management system that extends across an enterprise.

Leveraging Salesforce as a platform for infrastructure and security, they have added 115 customer objects which can be deployed to meet a range of customer needs. The service is designed to accommodate multi-disciplinary practices that include estate planning and tax advice in addition to financial planning.

The system can display a wide range of dashboards and provide a full perspective of all interactions an organisation is having with a client, a family, another extended group of related individuals or entities. It can also identify where multiple clients are supported by the same external third-parties.

Wherever possible extensive summaries of key information are contained within a single screen but they can be viewed from multiple different perspectives.

This is an end to end business management platform, it does not provide product speciality systems, such as portfolio management or financial planning, or for accountants an accounting platform, but delivers clients the ability to run every workflow across multiple different third party systems all in a single view. This is particularly beneficial for multi-disciplinary firms needed to use individual specialist systems. They can use Salesforce communities to build client portals for individual clients, but do not produce an off the shelf tool.

The ideal client is a growth orientated firm who have either complex business themselves, supporting multiple disciplines, very complex processes where they need to bring together several third party systems, or complex clients such as those needed by a ultra high net worth or multi-family office. I am coming across an increasing number of situations where there is a need to connect different professional specialities within larger organisation works, in the second stances this may have much to offer.  

Founded in 2010, the company have 700 clients live on their platform with close to $2 trillion in assets from firms with under $50 billion in assets, i.e. excluding some of their largest clients who include global banks and asset managers.

InvestCloud have created over 300 different apps which can be combined to create a wide range of content, either as end-to-end solutions or as gap filling components to supply features and functionality which an organisation may not have in their native technology proposition. They will deliver as much or as little as a customer needs. You don’t have to take the full suite of their services.

Prioritising design as a core competence means propositions can support different personas from the very digitally savvy to traditional analogue customers. Services range from client portals, adviser portals, digital on-boarding, financial planning and a wide range of other functions. It is worth looking at their periodic table of financial apps at investcloud.com to get a feel for the full range of options.

If you look at the table it highlights InvestCloud expertise in Experience (InvestCloud Blue), Management (InvestCloud Orange) Analytics InvestCloud Black and Processing InvestCloud Green. All services are fully mobile optimised and tablet-enabled.

This summer they acquired the rplan business set up by former Cofunds tech guru Andy Creak, who will be well known to anyone in the UK investment industry. This demo really only scratched the surface of what can be offered by the firm who are becoming and increasingly significant player.     

Founded in 2016, Clearnomics is a report writing tool to provide advisers and wealth managers with detailed market and economic insights for their clients via desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

Using a series of pre-programmed online questions, with bespoke customisation available, the adviser is able to select specific data items such as stock market and investment performance, which is of particular interest to the client, over a desired timeframe.

This will automatically create a ‘chart book’ using a combination of their Intelligent Assistant and API feeds, which can be adviser-branded and saved to the client record for use as part of the advice process in order to save the adviser time in conducting their own lengthy research documents. 

Smartleaf is an automated rebalancing platform tool to improve efficiency and compliance for advisers.

The company was founded in 1999 originally as a D2C offering many years before the term ‘robo’ was coined. In 2003 they gained their first Bank Trust client and the proposition seen today was developed.

Smartleaf provides highly automated tax management, at scale, for any sized portfolio ranging from $100,000,000, open architecture UMA accounts, to $5 robo equity investments which in turn can save more in taxes on average than what is paid in fees.

Distributing via three product channels, the service is used by over 1,000 advisers, TAMPs (Turn Key Asset Platforms) and robo clients. The number of end users has not been disclosed.

Everyday each account is rebalanced using a series of filters and queries which select various accounts and trades. These filters are all set by the client so that Smartleaf can trade the required accounts when necessary. The system understands which accounts need to be traded and which don’t (such as unknown securities).

This produces tax savings and reduces tracking errors in the portfolio and makes it more aligned to the client’s desired asset allocation and goals.

Each trade which is suggested by Smartleaf is assigned a cost benefit score. This identifies the commissions and taxes (cost) and how much closer this trade will get the client to their chosen goal or targets (benefits).

Portfolio health check reports for advisers are also produced to give to clients which demonstrate the savings made via the tax optimisation. The average taxes saved for accounts managed on Smartleaf last year was 1.60% of portfolio value, which is more than most adviser fees.