The recently concluded Technology Tools for Today (T3) Conference often serves as a showcase for what’s currently hot in advisor technology. It is the only time each year that virtually the whole advisor technology community gathers under one roof.

There were a number of hot topics this year, including the increased M&A activity taking place among financial software companies. There was also discussion about software that addresses the various dimensions of risk and about battling the robo-advisors.

When pondering this month’s column, I thought it might be interesting to focus on a single firm whose story involved all of these trends, Orion Advisor Services, which offers “software as a service” and portfolio accounting services to RIAs.

Orion has certainly been part of the M&A story. TA Associates, a large global private equity firm, has entered an agreement to acquire a majority stake in NorthStar Financial Services, Orion’s parent (NorthStar also owns CLS Investments, one of the largest ETF strategists in the United States, and Gemini Fund Services, a provider of mutual fund administration and pooled investment solutions).

According to Eric Clarke, the president of Orion, the sale primarily came about because one NorthStar owner wanted to retire, and the firm needed money to buy this person out. One option was to go public, another was a management buyout. A third was to seek investment from a private equity firm. The board decided that TA Associates offered the best option, and it allowed Orion to strengthen its balance sheet and stay private. It also left Orion in a better position to reinvest in its business or perhaps make acquisitions for growth.

Clarke says that Orion is growing at an unprecedented pace. Since opening its doors in 1999, the company has grown to serve approximately 570 advisory firms. It expects to add another 280 firms this year alone. To serve these new firms, Orion needs to invest and add resources.

(Edmond Walter, the CEO of eMoney, a firm recently acquired by Fidelity, cited similar reasons for his firm’s sale during his remarks at the T3 Conference.)

While it is encouraging to see these and other successful firms in the field growing rapidly, it is worth noting that for the first time in their history they have been challenged to fund growth organically. It remains to be seen how widespread this phenomenon is and what long-term impact there will be, if any, on advisors.

Orion has long helped advisors with their back-office needs and automation. The firm was originally established by the owners of an RIA firm to support their own RIA business. The firm’s robust portfolio accounting system includes a report builder that allows advisors to create highly customized client reports without any technical or programming knowledge. Not only can these reports access Orion data, they can also access and incorporate data elements from Orion partners such as AdvisoryWorld, MoneyGuidePro and Riskalyze, to name just a few. Advisors can also outsource their client billing to Orion, and the firm offers trading and rebalancing tools.

The firm’s scale and expertise allow it to perform many back-office tasks more efficiently and more cost effectively than a single advisory firm can on its own. The firm also innovates in ways that an individual RIA firm’s IT staff or consultant cannot. Orion was the first in its field to offer advisors their own private label mobile apps free of charge. One patent-pending technology allows advisors to incorporate video into their client reports. The list goes on.

A new back-office function the firm has created allows advisors to create “trading sleeves,” taking a single account and dividing it into multiple “virtual accounts.” Why might you want to do this? It might be to apply different model portfolios or a different fee schedule to a subset of the account’s assets. For example, if an account holds a client’s company stock that cannot be traded, or if a portion of the portfolio has to be held in cash at all times, this would be a way to segregate those assets. This new functionality also allows advisors to create rules for subsequent deposits and withdrawals. For example, you can specify that all new deposits be allocated to one sleeve, but that withdrawals come out of a different sleeve.

Of course, an advisor could also set up multiple accounts at a custodian, but this would be cumbersome, and moving money among the accounts would require more work. With virtual accounts, advisors can easily shuffle funds between virtual accounts as often as necessary. For many firms, the trading sleeve functionality will lower the cost of servicing accounts and improve efficiency.

For advisors trying to ensure that a client’s portfolios are aligned with their risk appetite, Orion offers deep integration with Riskalyze, a company that invented the “Risk Number.” Every night, Orion updates client portfolio data and Riskalyze computes a risk score for the portfolios. When a portfolio deviates from the client’s risk score, the advisor can take action to adjust the portfolio back into alignment.

For advisors who require in-depth portfolio analytics, including various measurements of risk, Orion works with AdvisoryWorld, one of whose products is Batch Risk Assessment. This product automates the process of visualizing multiple risk factors across a financial service firm’s entire book of business. Both Riskalyze and AdvisoryWorld offer proposal tools that allow advisors to illustrate a client’s current portfolio risk and compare it with the risk inherent in a proposed portfolio constructed by the advisors.

Perhaps the single most talked about topic at T3 2015 was robo-advisors and what tools advisors need to compete against them (and there was no shortage of firms in attendance hoping to offer tools to help. The players included established firms such as Advicent eMoney and MoneyGuidePro, newer recognizable names such as Betterment Institutional, and lesser-known names such as Jemstep, Motif, NestEgg, Oranj, Trizic, WealthAccess, Wealthminder and Upside—the last one of which was recently purchased by Envestnet.)

Orion, in partnership with sister company CLS and with Riskalyze, had one of the more compelling new product launches: AutoPilot. This is essentially a turnkey robo-advisor platform that advisors can brand as their own and easily embed into their own sites. Online clients can then go through the Riskalyze process to establish their Risk Number and synchronize their assets through account aggregation. Software powered by CLS will then create an online proposal for the client. Once accepted, an Orion application powers the online account opening and allows the client to complete all paperwork digitally. Once the account has been established, CLS provides the ongoing trading monitoring and rebalancing of the account. Clients have access to their accounts 24/7 through Orion’s client portal technology.

Advisors can monitor client accounts through the advisor portal powered by Orion, and all assets will be custodied at TD Ameritrade.

This entire package, including the software, the asset management, the portals and the custody, is available for a flat fee of 25 basis points, a very competitive price. One overlooked aspect of this offering is that it may have applicability that goes beyond the individual investor. We believe that this platform could also be appropriate for advisors who offer 401(k) plans and other retirement plans to small businesses.

This low-cost technology package, combined with institutional-quality money management, makes this an intriguing small business retirement plan solution.

Orion exhibits many of the characteristics of good “fintech” vendors. First, the firm sticks to its core business of handling portfolio accounting services for advisors. When it offers software or a service outside that core competency—risk assessment, analytical data or financial planning software—the company tries to partner with the best of breed firms and integrate deeply with them so it can maintain a focus on its core mission. Orion also exhibits a company culture of innovation. For instance, it sponsors an annual hackathon with partner firms that fosters innovations in their use with other software.

Often, in the technology business, firms create something wonderful and then get complacent. Not all firms constantly try to improve upon what they currently offer, but the really good ones do. Orion is one of those firms. Perhaps that’s a function of the fact that the company is privately owned, or the fact that the company’s market sector is populated by other highly capable firms such as Envestnet’s Tamarac unit and Advent’s Black Diamond unit.

But whatever the case may be, we believe that there are fundamental changes taking place in the financial services industry, and in order to compete, advisory firms will have to continue to invest heavily in technology in order to provide 24/7 client access and offer a better online experience, similar to the ones that direct-to-consumer firms provide. The firms will also have to increase their efficiency. Orion is one of the firms within our industry well positioned to deliver the types of products and services that advisors will require in the years ahead, as long as it maintains its current structure and focus. Judging by current growth projections, it seems that many advisory firms have come to a similar conclusion.