Wealthtech provider Orion announced a refresh of its brand this week, amongst a trio of milestones and developments that included surpassing $5 trillion in platform assets, attributed to both the organic and inorganic growth of its advisors, and changes to its investing and portfolio management tech stack.
The most obvious update is the addition of a star to the upper right of its logo, a visual reference to the astronomical constellation the company is named for.
The same has been done for some of its other brands, including Redtail and Brinker (though the colors differ), among others.
“In short, the refreshed identities align Redtail and Brinker visually with Orion, while preserving their heritage and role within our unified, forward-looking brand system,” wrote Orion Chief Marketing Officer Betsy Perez in an email.
The company also introduced a unified investment framework, designed to streamline how advisors evaluate and implement investment strategies.
“The unified investment framework reflects real integration across Orion’s investment technology and research,” wrote Ron Pruitt, Orion’s president of wealth management, in an email.
“It’s not a new product, but a unified structure that simplifies how advisors evaluate and implement strategies through the Orion Investment Portal,” he wrote, adding that the framework brings together Orion’s portfolio construction tools, due diligence process and strategist coverage under one consistent philosophy—grow, earn, diversify—making it easier for advisors to align portfolios with client goals.
“It represents both a technology and process advancement, connecting behavioral finance, risk analytics and tax-efficient model construction within a single, scalable experience,” wrote Pruitt.
CAIS, Schwab Advisor Services Expand Integrations
Alternative investment platform CAIS and Schwab Advisor Services expanded their technology integration. Schwab’s advisor clients will now be able to bring their account profiles onto the CAIS platform and execute transactions across subscription-based and ticker-traded alternative investment funds.
“We’re excited to deepen our work with CAIS to help advisors simplify their operations and manage alternative investments more efficiently,” said Alison Dooher, head of digital advisor solutions at Schwab Advisor Services, in a statement. “Together, we’re making it easier for advisors to access alternatives within their existing workflows, with greater transparency and reduced operational complexity.”
Schwab and CAIS have a relationship going back to at least 2020, when CAIS joined the Schwab Alternative Investment Platform, which provides Schwab clients with access to third-party alternative investment funds. Schwab also has a long-standing relationship with CAIS competitor iCapital.
LTC Technology Startup Waterlily Rolls Out Quote-and-Apply
Waterlily, which just two weeks ago won the annual XYPN Live AdviceTech competition, announced this week the launch of Quote-and-Apply.
The new tool uses AI and brute force computation across hundreds of thousands of insurance policy configurations to find the mathematically optimal policies for an individual or couple, according to a statement.
It accomplishes this based both on analysis of the individual or couples’ medical information and comparisons of insurance carrier underwriting guidelines for each specific product across more than 500 million data points.
Employing AI, including predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms, the AI can do in less than a second (according to the company), what has for years been a largely manual, time-consuming, and much less precise process.
While the application can analyze any carrier’s LTC policy, the new Quote-and-Apply feature has direct integrations with Nationwide, OneAmerica Financial, and CareScout (Nationwide and Genworth, which owns CareScout, were both investors in Waterlily’s seed funding round earlier this year).
Updates to MyVest Strategic Portfolio System
The enterprise wealth management technology provider MyVest, has expanded and integrated the proposal and transition capabilities of its Strategic Portfolio System.
The company has created a new workflow by combining proposal generation with tax-aware transition planning, which is meant to help advisors consolidate held-away accounts and create more personalized proposals.
More specifically, the new integrations mean that each transition plan and proposal is encoded in an Investment Policy Statement within SPS, which, in turn, is meant to help guide automated plan execution and ongoing portfolio management and make it more tax efficient.
