When we were launching this firm, we wanted to identify an initial platform acquisition, or operating firm, that out of the gate was aligned with our service offering and had bones that we could build from. The idea was that we would have to make very few changes to the tech stack that we acquired. I’d say we were pretty good at identifying that initial firm and have had a tech stack that we could build from.
CRM: Salesforce
We are very much a CRM-centric firm, and we take a CRM-centric approach. We learned over the years that all of our offices around the country, operating with our many clients, spend a lot of time in the CRM system. It’s got all the contact information. It’s got the calendaring system. You can build out the workflows that you need within the proper system, assuming you made a good selection, and if you made a proper selection, you can integrate it with other systems so that you can have a single pane of glass into the client relationship. That’s our overarching goal, and that is why we are using, as that kind of center hub, Salesforce, which is, of course, common among the larger advisory firms. We do a lot to try and bring a lot of information into that hub.
Reporting & Portfolio Management / Trading & Rebalancing: Orion
On the portfolio and reporting side, we use Orion. Again, they’re another major player in the industry that has also seen a lot of growth and made a lot of good strategic acquisitions to build out a pretty robust and broad platform.
We invest a lot in organic growth, but we also invest a lot in inorganic acquisitions and building out our footprint across the country. When you do that, you learn that there’s value to having systems that are flexible and can provide some continuity. Even though your longer-term endpoint may be different, you’re trying to provide as much stability as you can for a new firm that you’re acquiring and integrating into your business.
Having a platform like Orion, where you have a lot of different capabilities, allows you to provide continuity within the existing tech stack that you have. We tap into some of their compliance. We use their risk intelligence, HiddenLevers, for a number of ancillary things [beyond reporting and portfolio management].
Document Management (and Office Productivity): Microsoft
At our prior business, we were on Google. But one of the challenges that we found was that most of the advisory practices that were joining us were on [a] Microsoft [environment]. It was a bit of a change moving over from Google, and you can go through all the pros and cons of Microsoft versus Google. But, at the end of the day, we don’t want to have headaches around which document editor you’re utilizing and things like that. So we’re on Microsoft, and it makes life easier.
Financial Planning: RightCapital / eMoney Advisor / Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
Our strategic solve for financial planning is RightCapital. Our whole service model is about really trying to expand the services that we’re providing to clients to go beyond investments. Tax is one key area for us, and so we do a lot of tax planning work. We even have our own tax preparation team. One of the positive pieces of feedback that we heard loud and clear from the tax team was the kind of tax planning capabilities within RightCapital and the ability for it to be very tax aware.
We’ve also invested significantly in their solution over the last several years, making it very easy for people to pick up and learn. We also have our Organic Growth Hub that has new leads coming in, and we have a concierge team working with those leads. They’ll start to actually build out a plan as part of that process with that new prospect.
We recognize, though, that when you’re bringing on a new advisor and their team and integrating them into our company, there’s already a lot of change going on. You try to understand what is really important to do now, and what you can take longer to go and do. Financial planning fits into that category. We don’t need, on day one, to convert all of the plans [to RightCapital]. Because of that, we do have relationships with MoneyGuidePro and eMoney for continuity, but over time, everything will be moving over to RightCapital.
AI Services: Microsoft CoPilot
We use Microsoft Teams, which takes care of the note-taking and summaries through CoPilot. We have started to go a bit further. We’re evaluating what Salesforce has as an AI offering. We do a good job of bringing all of the data into Salesforce—all the client information—so it’s a logical place for it.
We have built out an initial custom module to help with meeting prep. We recognize the low-hanging fruit with AI. In every single client meeting, people are looking at the notes, they’re looking at tasks, they’re looking at opportunities, and so on to come up with the current summary of a client situation and the agenda for the upcoming meeting. We actually hired a consultant to help us build out connectivity between Salesforce and, ultimately, Microsoft.
We’re intentionally keeping our AI roadmap pretty short, because things change so quickly. We’re not getting hung up on trying to figure out a three-year plan for AI. It’s more for the next two quarters, because the whole landscape changes all the time.
Direct Indexing and/or Tax-Loss Harvesting Services: Orion
Orion has a great direct indexing solution that includes active tax-loss harvesting. They don’t label it as a direct indexing solution. They label it as a custom indexing solution because you can customize the endpoint. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a published index. You can give it any endpoint you want, and it’ll optimize towards that endpoint. I think people sometimes underestimate the overhead of additional systems and interfaces, as well as just the relationships and time it takes to develop them.
As told to senior reporter Alex Ortolani and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of Wealth Management.
Want to tell us what’s in your wealthstack? Contact Alex Ortolani at [email protected].
