Envision Financial Systems and U.S. Bancorp Fund Services recently announced the launch of FundKeeper, a new mutual fund account servicing platform.
FundKeeper allows financial intermediaries to support mutual-fund-only investor accounts.
Traditionally, intermediaries have held these accounts directly with mutual fund families because of the fees associated with conducting the business through a traditional brokerage platform. Unfortunately, the direct business is often manually processed and inefficient in nature. Money movements and reporting are decentralized. Operationally, it is challenging.
FundKeeper provides access to more than 16,000 funds with a largely digital mutual fund experience, allowing financial intermediary firms to enhance up front compliance and eliminate the need for back-end consolidation of their clients’ mutual fund holdings. This can help them comply with the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule and help increase customer satisfaction.
Among the benefits FundKeeper brings to advisors, it provides a single mutual fund experience through a single web and mobile interface and consolidated statements. This is something that traditional channels cannot provide without significant additional expenses.
The platform offers enhanced controls, which provide financial intermediaries with the ability to select the funds their representatives have access to, set up parameters to determine investor suitability, leverage automated breakpoint calculations, and gain easy access to position and activity data. It offers integration with much of the software that financial services firms already use, including many of the most popular portfolio management and accounting packages. Money movement through digital as opposed to mail and physical checks offers operational efficiencies, including the ability to invest and redeem faster, and improved security.
The FundKeeper solution appears to be best suited for small to mid-sized broker-dealers and large RIA firms that have significant direct mutual fund businesses. By leveraging the scale and expertise of Envision and US Bancorp, such firms can achieve efficiencies and economies of scale that they could not possibly realize on their own.