Complect: Taking The Complexity Out Of Compliance
Need a compliance specialist? Complect, a regulatory technology start-up, hopes to match financial advisors with compliance experts for everything from one-off projects to full-time gigs.
Complect’s co-founder, Hanh Nguyen, said her company is tuned to the emergence of the gig economy. She herself is a former compliance consultant for ACA Compliance Group; her partner James Lerner (also her husband), is a former investment banker turned venture capital and private equity investor.
“I noticed a gap in this highly fragmented market,” said Nguyen of her previous experiences. “There were plenty of compliance consultants in the space, but no repository for businesses to easily identify, compare and hire them.”
Complect’s platform allows stand-alone advisors and small-cap firms to choose a compliance specialist for a project and then rate and review the consultant afterward (she plans to eventually offer the service to larger enterprises). Lerner says the platform can also act as an ancillary human resource tool: Compliance firms that offer their services must register their individual team members so they can also be reviewed and rated. Nguyen added that this feature further helps businesses identify who they want and what they will get.
Specialists on the platform should have a minimum of three years’ compliance experience. Current users have 13 years of direct compliance experience, according to Complect, and 26% are former regulators. There are 41 specialists registered on the site from 16 states and countries like Australia and Bahrain.
Morningstar Launches Morningstar Direct for Wealth Management
Morningstar announced an investment analysis platform with a cloud-based infrastructure for wealth management professionals.
The research provider designed the platform to streamline communications among manager researchers, compliance teams, portfolio strategists and client-facing advisors. Teams can receive firmwide notifications about products and use the platform for real-time collaborations.
The scenario analysis feature allows teams to identify risky investments and catalog lists of investment recommendations.
Using Morningstar’s independent data and research, the Morningstar Direct for Wealth Management platform offers a review of data points such as a fund’s active share and environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. Users can customize the way they integrate data on the platform
Vestmark Expands Vestmark Manager Marketplace
Vestmark’s slogan for its latest upgrade is “advice delivery simplified.”
The wealth management technology provider’s marketplace platform connects asset managers to sponsors like registered investment advisors, banks and broker-dealers, and now it’s expanding with a research portal.
The portal will help advisors at sponsor firms sift through manager strategies.
The platform is Vestmark’s solution to the challenge sponsors and managers face with model access and distribution. This way, asset managers can distribute their strategies and sponsors can examine and implement them. So far, the online database holds 200 strategies by 85 asset managers and strategists. The platform launched in 2016.
Vanguard ETF Will Offer Global Bond Portfolio
Vanguard has plans to launch a Total World Bond ETF to offer access to investment-grade bonds across the globe.
In May, the company filed a preliminary registration statement for the ETF and plans to launch it in the third quarter. The Vanguard Fixed Income Group will serve as advisor to the fund, which will track the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Float Adjusted Composite Index and have an estimated expense ratio of 0.09%.
The fund will be an ETF of ETFs, with investments in the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF and the Vanguard Total International Bond ETF, the company said.
Vanguard Changes Three Funds For MSCI
Vanguard is seeking to get ahead of the costs that could result from MSCI’s proposed sector changes announced in 2017.
The mutual fund giant has created temporary transition benchmarks to track three funds and their respective ETF shares. The company says its approach is in the best interest of shareholders and provides better representation of the sectors they track.
Vanguard will modify its Telecommunication Services Index Fund, its Consumer Discretionary Index Fund and its Information Technology Index Fund. The telecom fund will be renamed the Communication Services Index Fund. These modifications come in advance of MSCI’s planned changes, which should conclude in September.
Advisor Group and Envestnet Launch Retirement Plan Central
Envestnet has partnered with the independent broker-dealer the Advisor Group to create a practice management platform for independent 401(k) advisors.
Key features of the platform include a client dashboard and an integrated CRM, a secure document vault and a plan provider request-for-proposal (RFP) search tool.
The dashboard’s user interface has been simplified to an entire view of an advisor’s book of business in “one line of sight.”
The document vault can hold items like retirement plan documents, performance reports, tax reports, estate planning documents, personal client information and meeting notes. It’s also viewable by the client and the advisor.