“We help make the advice more accessible to clients and enable advisors to expand their relationships with great ease and efficiency. Jemstep supports advisor’s client outreach and in communicating their service value proposition.”—

Simon

Simon highlights that being backed by Invesco has turned out to be an incredible strength for Jemstep, as it has brought stability and certainty to both sides. Jemstep can continue to deeply invest in the platform and services, and Jemstep’s customers can optionally benefit from the services offered by Invesco, including investment solutions optimized for retail investors, consulting to help with the adoption of Jemstep Advisor Pro, and support to ensure that advisors are comfortable using the platform with their clients. “That combination of Jemstep and Invesco is a very powerful component of the value proposition.”—

Simon

Mobile investing

Since a number of financial companies rely on mobile apps as an additional channel to attract clients, particularly millennials, Jemstep offers two options to support this need:

  1. The front-end of the platform is written in responsive code. Clients of financial firms can access the Jemstep Advisor Pro application on a mobile device with high-quality responsive code.
  2. APIs are being made available to enable financial firms and banks to integrate the Jemstep Advisor Pro application into their mobile apps.
Integrations with customer operations and major industry players

Jemstep and Jemstep Advisor Pro support partnership and integrations both from a business and product architecture perspective. From the beginning, Jemstep has not been designed as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, Jemstep’s service is designed to integrate with each advisory firm’s technology and workflows to enable the firm to not just digitize its client experience but also digitize their middle and back office operations of its wealth management business to support growth of AUM and reduce errors and cost to serve clients.

Simon insists that successful implementation of Jemstep’s solution requires integration with the advisory firms’ many functions, including marketing, sales, client service, onboarding, operations, investment management, compliance, etc. It is required to ensure that the digital platform is not a bolt on solution but works well with the going forward processes and technologies.

Jemstep Advisor Pro provides integrations with a number of companies, including custodians, providers for CRM, account aggregation, digital signature, online chat, and other services:

“On the custodian side, we’re partnering with BNY Mellon’s Pershing, TD Ameritrade, and SSG, which enable straight-through or approval based processing. We have a robust integration with Salesforce that makes client and prospect information viewable to advisors from their Salesforce portal through a salesforce application. For account aggregation, we integrate with CashEdge with others in the works. DocuSign is deeply embedded in our platform to enable paperless onboarding. We’re also integrated with chat service providers.”—

Simon

Since analytic services are considered to be extremely important for an advisory platform, Jemstep Advisor Pro integrates with analytics platforms, as well as marketing platforms such as

Marketo

and

Oracle Eloqua

. Jemstep also offers integrations that automate investment management, portfolio management, and trading. Jemstep’s customer-centric approach to integrations supports both embedded solutions and select third-party solutions chosen by advisory firms. “Our robust integrations have laid the foundation for additional integrations in support of our enterprise customers. Given how dynamic the digital advice space is, the flexibility and optionality our platform offers plays well with the firms that we’re serving.”—

Simon

Data and cyber security

In working with large financial institutions, Jemstep needs to meet the highest cyber security standards. The company takes a multi-layered approach to managing the security of its application and partners with whom it integrates and works.

“Security is taken very seriously, not just by Jemstep but also by Invesco. Jemstep has invested heavily over a number of years and we again benefit from the Invesco resources, capabilities, and practices that further support Jemstep and our customers.”—

Simon

Simon shared that Jemstep is compliant with

SOC 2 Type I and they are working on obtaining a review for SOC 2 Type II

. The approach that they take is to protect not just their systems, but also the information of advisors, advisory firms, and their clients.

Jemstep applies best practices such as pure coding and secure software development.

“We have implemented a multi-layered approach to data and network security —from infrastructure to application, from data storage to networking. It is a robust, holistic approach that is constantly evolving.”—

Simon

It also considers

OCC regulations

that are focused on protecting client data in banks and other financial institutions. Customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using some of the most secure standard mechanisms. The company has infrastructure controls in place that limit employees from accessing client data.
On the investment solutions and analytics side

Jemstep Advisor Pro is an open-investment platform. This means that it enables advisors to use their own internal investment strategies or strategies from third parties.

In addition, Jemstep leverages its extensive experience and understanding of the practical issues and costs involved in implementing investment strategies for individual investors to offer customers investment models that have specifically been designed and optimized for a digital wealth platform. With Invesco’s Global Solutions portfolio construction experts, a range of investment solutions are available to meet the needs and requirements of both end investors and advisors. The construction of the models includes factors such as the minimization of total cost to clients (transaction costs, fund fees, tax efficiencies etc.), diversification (across fund families, investment factors), and marketing and advisor support with investment solutions tailored to support a range of account sizes from smaller balance to HNW clientele.

“We have the flexibility to use customer models or, through Invesco, we can offer customers a plug-and-play integrated set of models if they prefer our approach. The models are backed by deep analytics, marketing material, as well as training and support, increasing operational efficiency and reducing complexity.”—

Simon

Software architecture and technologies
Matthew points out that there is a clear relationship between architecture and team structure.

“Engineers that are working and breathing the product are usually best equipped to understand the actual software architecture,”

he said. Matthew also believes that engineers shouldn’t lose touch with system architecture, as this offers better flexibility and greater efficiency in the team.

Jemstep’s architecture has also changed to reflect what drives their business. Going from a B2C to a B2B model has influenced its architecture, with core principles, technologies and new elements evolving over time.