RegentAtlantic is being recognized for its approach to technology.
new software and other technology improvements
are the types of steps that usually don't attract much attention-except
for the value added that shows up in your bottom line.
But RegentAtlantic Capital LLC of Chatham, N.J., a
firm with a reputation and a strong track record of leveraging
technology to support growth, received something a little extra. In
November Regent Atlantic was named Schwab Institutional's first annual
winner of its Best in Tech Impact Award at the Schwab Impact 2006
Conference in Washington, D.C.
Rather than focusing on technology for technology's
sake, RegentAtlantic looks for ways to apply technology in order to
help their employees become more productive, says Christopher J.
Cordaro, the firm's chief investment officer. "What we have
always tried to do is make it more about the people than about the
technology. We want to save employees from doing labor intensive tasks
over and over again," he says. "This frees them up to concentrate on
serving our clients better."
RegentAtlantic, with 30 employees managing more than
$1.4 billion in assets for approximately 800 clients, has long been a
leader in adapting new technologies and applying them to a financial
practice. Cordaro says that his firm adapted document imaging in 1996,
long before most firms. RegentAtlantic's document imaging and
management system is not elaborate, but Cordaro says it works just
fine.
"We use HP scanners to scan just about everything,"
he says. Documents are scanned as Adobe portable document format (PDF)
files, and they are stored using the native Windows directory
structure. "Initially, we used a product called FileNet," says Cordaro,
"but it was too complex and cumbersome." Now, a folder can be created
for each client on a hard drive, with subfolders as needed. If a file
cannot be located through the directory structure, Cordaro uses Google
Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/) to locate what he needs. "It's
simple, and it works for me," he says.
The firm uses software to help manage client
portfolios. When the firm was smaller, all portfolios were managed
individually and manually, but with more than 800 portfolios to
oversee, some automation is necessary. An SQL database product from
SoftPak Financial Systems stores individual client information and
preferences, which allows the investment team to manage portfolios in
batches.
"It a client works for Pfizer, the client is
probably overexposed financially to Pfizer, so we may not want the
client to own any more Pfizer stock," Cordaro continues. "This
information would be entered into the software. Another client may have
zero cost basis stock that they refuse to sell. Other accounts may have
tax loss carry forwards that impact portfolio decisions." SoftPak
software helps RegentAtlantic automate the portfolio customization
process.
"Our experience with SoftPak got us thinking: If we
can achieve automation with individual stock portfolios, why can't we
do it with other things?" says Cordaro. That sort of thinking lead to
RegentAtlantic's role as a co-founder of iRebal, the intelligent
rebalancing software, first profiled in the January 2005 issue of
Financial Advisor.
According to Gobind Daryanani, who actually
performed manual rebalancing for RegentAtlantic before developing the
software: "iRebal allowed me to rebalance a household's account in one
to two minutes that previously took 18 to 20 minutes."
RegentAtlantic's current technology initiative is
upgrading their CRM software. "We realized that what we needed was much
better information on workflows," says Cordaro. "We have five service
teams. We could not tell which ones had too much or too little to do at
a given time. We want to be able to redirect resources to where they
are needed. We also want to compare teams to see where their individual
strengths and weaknesses lie. Perhaps we can direct workflows to a
team's strength, or perhaps we can cross train so that best practices
are shared among teams." Without good CRM, this type of analysis is not
possible.
RegentAtlantic chose Microsoft CRM because, while
other firms offered software with similar attributes, it felt that
Microsoft aggressively pursues that market segment it, would have the
biggest impact on CRM software in the future.
Looking forward, RegentAtlantic's next big challenge
is database integration. When they surveyed the software landscape in
the past, and as they survey it today, Cordaro and his firm do not see
any integrated "killer app" capable of running all or most of their
business on the horizon. That means that they need to use multiple
applications, but they must have the ability to pull information from
various sources and combine the output into in integrated reporting
solution.
"As we grow, our management and compliance reporting
needs grow," Cordaro says. "I can no longer just walk around the office
and know what is going on. I want exception reporting so I can see what
accounts have not been reviewed last week. Then I can find out why.
With exception reports, I can see who is performing at a high level and
who isn't."
As Cordaro sees it, the first step is scripted SQL
reports that can pull from multiple SQL databases. Ideally, the firm
would like to standardize (around one database structure, SQL), then
centralize (have all the information in one location), and then
customize.
Joel P. Bruckenstein, publisher of
Virtual Office News (www.virtualofficenews.com) and an expert in
applied technology for financial services professionals, can be
contacted at [email protected].