Interactive Brokers Group is rolling out platform enhancements that it hopes will attract more financial advisors.

Known as a deep discounter catering to active traders and small hedge funds, the firm also has a growing RIA custody business.

As of mid-October, Interactive Brokers (IB) served 4,289 RIAs, up about 11 percent year over year, said Steve Sanders, executive vice president of product development.

One new platform enhancement is a CRM interface, now in beta test, that better integrates with account-management functions and works on mobile devices, Sanders said.

The old CRM software “is not as pretty and intuitive as the new one,” he added.

In September, IB opened up to non-clients its account-aggregation and portfolio-analysis system. The now-public Portfolio Analyst service lets potential advisors and customers check out the analytics and reports IB offers.

Portfolio Analyst is “phenomenal [and] extremely accurate,” said Parker Evans, president of Successful Portfolios of Clearwater, Fla., who custodies assets at IB. The one drawback is that the program lacks some asset classification functionality, he said, so it doesn’t yet match Morningstar’s portfolio X-Ray feature.

Over the last year, IB has also been shoring up its banking and cash managements services—an area advisors say had been lacking. The firm doesn’t offer check writing, but Sanders says that with bill-pay capability and a debit card that integrates with investment accounts, customers don’t need paper checks. Credit is extended with a loan against securities—at a current interest rate of 3.69 percent or lower, not the 19 percent charged by credit cards, Sanders said, adding that there’s no need to move money around when IB pays 1.69 percent on idle cash ($100,000 minimum required).

Firm-wide as of September, total customer equity in all channels increased 23 percent year over year, to $142.5 billion. IB’s institutional business, which includes RIAs and brokerage firms as well as hedge funds and proprietary trading groups, make up about 65 percent of total assets.

It’s still a small player compared to Schwab’s nearly $3.6 trillion in total assets and TD Ameritrade’s $1.3 trillion.

But IB is on a growth curve, with customer assets up 244 percent over the past five years, when the S&P 500 was up about 60 percent.

The firm’s cut-rate pricing of one dollar or less per trade is attracting advisors, of course, but Sanders says the ability to trade in multiple global markets and currencies is also a big draw.

“If you want to trade around the world, we are one of the only solutions,” he said.

That assumes advisors can figure some things out on their own. Advisors say the platform has so much capability that it can be daunting to learn. But they do give IB kudos for improving ease of use in recent years.

“There’s a huge learning curve at IB,” said Wes Gray, chief executive of Alpha Architect in Broomall, Penn., which has about $500 million in client funds at Interactive. “It’s not exactly made for your grandma.”

Gray says he doesn’t need the “bells and whistles” offered by other custodians, and for someone like him who needs good trading technology, transparency, and the ability to access and manage data, “IB dominates.”

Like Gray, Evans used Interactive personally before starting his RIA in 2010. About half of his $180 million in assets are at Interactive, with the rest at Schwab and TD Ameritrade.

“All [those firms] are very good,” Evans said, but cost-wise IB is generally better for accounts larger than $100,000—the level where IB waives its $10 per month inactivity fee. Smaller accounts must generate $10 in commissions, or be charged the difference.

“And if you borrow on margin, it’s always better to be on IB,” Evans said, because of the firm’s low lending rates.

“One reason for [Interactive Brokers’] success is that they’re not trying to compete with the major custodians,” said Christopher Winn, managing principal at AdvisorAssist LLC, an advisor consulting firm.

“They’re probably not the best [for] the $500 million [RIA] firm that does sophisticated wealth management for clients,” but it can be a good place for asset managers and start-ups, Winn said.

And IB has a very deep pool of potential start-ups. About 13,000 traders operate at the firm as a “friends and family” advisor, that is, someone who trades for themselves and for 15 or fewer clients and does not yet need to get registered. IB offers these traders a master account for fee collection and trade allocation.

In 2016, IB launched Greenwich Consulting, a compliance consulting service, to guide start-ups through the registration process.

Meanwhile, the firm continues to play a wider role in industry disruption.

Last month, Interactive became the first public company to list on the upstart Investors Exchange (IEX), a trading venue founded by high-speed-trading critic Brad Katsuyama, who was featured in author Michael Lewis's book "Flash Boys." IEX uses a “speed bump” to prevent high-speed traders from trading against public orders.

The move to IEX wasn’t surprising. IB founder and CEO Thomas Peterffy has been an outspoken critic of high-speed trading and the payments other exchanges make for the order flow that high-speeders can trade against.