Many integrations for maximum flexibility

Blaze Portfolio has successfully integrated with dozens of companies and platforms. On the trading side, they currently trade with over 50 different executing brokers and custodians. These include Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, and TD Ameritrade. Apart from these four giants, they also work with Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Susquehanna, and Bloomberg. Bryson points out that Blaze Portfolio has a wide asset coverage, including equities and exchange-traded funds, and also trades mutual funds with their four aforementioned main custodians.

In terms of portfolio accounting and reporting, Blaze Portfolio is integrated with Advent products such as Black Diamond, Axys, APX, and Orion, Addepar. The long list of 15–20 different account systems Blaze Portfolio uses to pull data also includes PCR and Clearwater.

When asked whether robo-advisors are integrated with Blaze Portfolio, Bryson said:

“Yes, they are, and [there are] some that are using us as their back-end, they’re using their own front-end because it’s not something that interfaces with the end-clients, but we handle the operations and trade processing.”

Blaze Portfolio has its own API, allowing the platform to be integrated with practically any existing solution or company. They released their first API in 2013; at the time, few firms were doing anything with APIs, so it was for the most part unused. Bryson remarks that his company is in the process of fully revamping their API infrastructure, and plan on releasing a full set of API capabilities by the end of 2018 so that technology-savvy firms can take advantage of those API features.

The right balance

Blaze Portfolio provides a variety of different types of rebalancing. They offer sleeve-level rebalancing, where advisors can have multiple strategies in a single model; another option is the ability to have multiple tiers, so advisors can go down as many levels as they want, essentially having models of models.

“We also have asset-allocation-type rebalancing, which is a kind of top-down rebalancing where you don’t necessarily have specific securities. You can do fixed income, ladder modeling. There’s a lot of different types of modeling that you can utilize, where it’s more of an asset-allocation-type modeling.”

The Blaze Portfolio ruleset is a potent part of their modeling concept. There are rules on compliance, pre-trade compliance, security equivalents, tax optimization, and location optimization. Bryson said that the platform is also able to monitor drift. This, and the ability to generate orders in many different ways, was included specifically to provide a scalable and streamlined way of managing orders for both small and large organizations.

A tall tech stack

Blaze Portfolio uses a predominantly Microsoft stack. It’s a sophisticated web-based application written in .NET with SQL Server on the backend, developed in C#. At the frontend, Blaze Portfolio has undertaken a major makeover to the UI, with HTML5 and React or Angular.

The soon-to-be released UI update will pair HTML5 with the new API capabilities for even faster, real-time trading. The release is planned for the end of 2018.