Technology Special Section

 

Bryson Pouw
President
Blaze Portfolio

 

 

Advisor Technology Panacea: Balancing
Scale and High-Touch

The right technology can be a huge benefit to investment advisors. But even the most advanced technology won’t help if it’s not designed to support your core services.

 

The emergence of robo-advisors raised the bar for scalability and fully automated portfolio management. While this technology brings plenty of benefits, full automation has limitations if it only addresses a small piece of the client’s financial puzzle. Clients with complex financial situations may be looking for comprehensive planning or creative solutions. In order to scale, robo-advisors are designed to limit options and variables, making it more difficult to provide a higher level of service.

 

On the opposite side of the spectrum is a highly customized approach. Advisors use Excel spreadsheets to individually tailor portfolios for each client. That level of attention comes with tradeoffs, including limited scalability, questionable data integrity, and non-standardized process.

 

The right technology provides the perfect balance between customized and streamlined approaches. Advisors can leverage technology to streamline their business in a number of ways, including: standardization and automation of workflows, seamless integration, and straight-through processing.

 

The larger challenge is to help advisors offer customized solutions that will demonstrate a higher level of service and also target higher net-worth clients with tailored solutions. To achieve this goal, advisor and robo-advisor technology needs to evolve and develop the intelligence to easily capture a client’s entire financial picture and recommend solutions, while also working in tandem with advisors and clients in a continual feedback loop.

 

At Blaze Portfolio, we are working to achieve this aim with our revolutionary trading and rebalancing platform, ATOM Align. We built ATOM Align from the ground up to deliver the best of all worlds — highly automated scalable rebalancing solutions, plus customizable portfolio modeling and end-to-end straight-through trade processing.

For more information, please visit www.blazeportfolio.com


BlazePortfolio Systems delivers streamlined technology solutions to hundreds of investment professionals, helping them execute over $1 billion in trades every month. ATOM Align, our flagship product, is a web-based portfolio rebalancing and trade order management application designed to help advisors manage, implement, and execute investment strategies. Integrated with the leading RIA portfolio accounting and back-office systems, ATOM Align combines rebalancing and OMS into a single platform.
Our intuitive system offers many features designed for firms like yours, including:
• Tax location optimization and household rebalancing • Legacy holdings and cash management • Fully customizable multi-asset class investment models • Real-time electronic block trading and
allocations