Eric Clarke, CEO of Orion Advisor Services, founded his company as a portfolio reporting solution in 1999, but 21 years later, it sits on the verge of offering a unified, seamless technology stack for financial advisors.

Orion is becoming a wealthtech one-stop shop for advisors and is experiencing user and asset growth comparable to the expansion of its offering. Earlier this year, the firm announced that it had passed $1 trillion dollars in assets under administration on its platform and that it now worked with over 2,000 advisory firms, increasingly on the financial planning side of advisors’ business.

“We have been thinking about how planning fits into the advisor-client relationship,” said Kelly Waltrich, chief marketing officer for Orion Advisor Solutions. “Orion will likely be one of the first firms to show finding a prospect, transitioning that prospect to a client, engaging in planning, serving that client an investment proposal based on their plan, and then opening the account all in one single workflow. We’re looking across the tools, and we see that we could very well connect all of those things.”

This unified technology suite would be able to power nearly any aspect of an advisor’s practice. It’s an offering that only recently began to take coherent form through a number of acquisitions and home-grown innovations.

Clarke has recognized that the biggest drivers of Orion’s “22% to 25%” growth rate over the past five years have been independent, fiduciary advisors seeking technology to create scale and efficiency. As Clarke puts it, most innovation is occurring on the fiduciary side of the industry, and many advisors are not content with the captive, non-integrated technology solutions offered by wirehouses and other large incumbents. Those newly independent advisors, with the right technology and support, had huge potential as engines of growth. It was an opportunity he wanted to seize for Orion.

“In order to achieve our growth goals and objectives, we not only have to worry about bringing on our next advisors, we can also hit those goals through accelerating the growth rate of the advisors that we already serve,” said Clarke. “One way we’re making a big investment in that is the Market*r platform. A second way we’re accelerating advisor growth is through our Advizr acquisition.”

Integrated, Automated Marketing
Market*r was launched in March as the Covid-19 pandemic was roiling financial markets and advisors were faced with the challenge of serving nervous clients and the opportunity to find new leads and prospects from the underserved. At heart, the platform is content-driven, creating personalized materials on topics relevant to the end client across multiple channels on a monthly basis that advisors can further customize with their own philosophy and analysis.

The platform is also automated across the marketing process and offers reporting on leads, prospects and clients on a single dashboard so advisors can gauge the efficacy of their campaigns.

“Most marketing platforms focused on serving one-off pieces of content through a single channel,” said Waltrich. “We wanted advisors to think about the way they distribute content in terms of campaigns with omni-channel touch points, landing pages, white papers, digital ads and email workflows all tied to a single campaign topic, and with topics tied to financial planning modules in the planning platform.”

Market*r has been made available in tiers so advisors can select the level of sophistication they desire, from a basic collateral-only, intermediate collateral-plus-technology and white-glove options that can include consulting services, planning support and custom campaign design and execution.

Clarke emphasized the link between strong marketing to transform leads to prospects and eventually to clients, and client experience and technology to transform a client into a promoter who will advocate for an advisor’s business.

At heart, Market*r stems from another recent addition to the Orion ecosystem, this one via acquisition: Advizr, a high-tech financial planning platform that has been rebranded as Orion Planning. Market*r connects with Orion Planning to create a more seamless link between engaging prospects and the financial plans delivered to them when they are transformed into clients.

Upgrading The Planning Experience
Orion purchased New York-based  Adivzr in the summer of 2019 to add what Clarke felt was a high-quality planning solution to its platform – the acquisition was never meant to stand alone, but add a new capability onto the existing portfolio management tools.

“We were looking for ways that we could integrate with other technologies to create a best-in-class client experience for our advisors to extend,” said Clarke. “When we looked at what was available, we ran across what Advizr was doing and we were blown away. We also really found ourselves admiring what Personal Capital was doing, not only from a technology experience, but how they used the technology to support their growth and drive new business.”

Earlier this year, Orion suggested that the Advizr acquisition was helping to drive new business to its platform, as in the first six months since the acquisition closed, 500 additional firms signed on as clients. In that time, over 7,000 plans had been designed for 17,000 investors new to the platform.  The acquisition has also allowed Orion to make greater inroads among company retirement plans, which made up a significant portion of Advizr’s business prior to the acquisition.

With Orion Planning, the platform is better suited to compete with Envetnet’s Tamarac and Fidelity’s WealthScape as an essentially all-in-one technology offering.

“Honestly, when it comes time for advisors to demonstrate value through planning, we think it’s important that we support the ability to technologically enable the fiduciary process, and while that’s important, we also want to make sure the planning process that our advisors extend to the client is a great experience,” said Clarke. “All too often that planning experience resembles getting a root canal to tne investor, and something is created that collects a lot of dust on the shelf over the years.

“With this tech-enabled fiduciary process, we’re hoping the plans are an integrated part of someone seeing not only their current financial state, but their potential financial future, and that they’ll update it with episodic workflows that are relevant as time moves forward,” said Clarke.

At this year’s T3 conference, Orion also introduced a new user interface that organized its traditional app-centric style with a customizable dashboard layout to allow advisors to operate more efficiently. The new interface, Orion Connect, aims to centralize the information advisors need most and allow them to complete their most common tasks without leaving the home dashboard.

Orion has also recently deepened integrations with other finteh, like MaxMyInterest, LifeYield, Totum Risk and SalesForce, in hopes of offering users a streamlined, unified experience. Notably, those integrations include a partnership with Experian to offer credit-monitoring services on its platform.

Clarke cites technology giants as the inspiration behind the Advizr acquisition and broad user experience upgrades.

“There are things we observe from outside financial services that we need to bring back to create best-in-class experiences on-par with what our client expectations are,” said Clarke. “Our goals shouldn’t be based on the client experience of doing business with a local bank, but along the lines of experiences similar to Netflix and Amazon. We’ve got to make sure that our client experience is akin to those best-in-class tech experiences.”

A New Investment Option: Orion Communities
Though it has operated a TAMP since 2018, formerly FTJ FundChoice, now Orion Portfolio Solutions, Orion only recently launched a model marketplace allowing advisors to blend model strategies with their own investment decision-making. Orion Communities was rolled out along with Market*r in March with 40 money managers on board across equities, fixed income and alternatives.

Clarke organizes the marketplace constituents into brand names, like models from BlackRock and Amerian Funds, boutiques, like Clark Capital Management and Main Management, and “diversifier” strategies involving alternatives and other assets in non-correlated models. The strategies have been carefully vetted by Orion for consistency.

“Advisors are already able to access a variety of different model marketplaces from different locations,” said Clarke. “Our technology makes it easy for advisors to not only adapt a model or a strategy, but to also individually customize and personalize that model portfolio for their end investor, making sure that they’re taking into consideration, in a specific way, that client’s individual cost-basis considerations, any investment restrictions, and then being able to deploy that model in a way that’s most meaningful to each of the investors they’re working with.”

Clarke said that Orion recognized that some advisors wanted to offer their clients managed investment offerings personalized beyond what can be found on turnkey platforms but maintain a technology-enhanced experience.

The strategies are available as separately and unified managed accounts, and are highly customizable, said Clarke. Users can use Communities to select, compare and allocate to models across a number of characteristics. Advisors can then choose whether or not to approve any changes submitted by the models’ strategists within their accounts, or choose to automatically accept recommended trades.

“Too many model marketplaces require advisors to adopt a model in more or less as-is format,” said Clarke. With communities, advisors will be “able to bring that model into the household level, and then apply rules and restrictions in an automated way to optimize the outcome for that investor.”

Growth In The Age Of Covid
Orion hasn’t lost sight of the fact that these significant expansions come as advisors and their clients are reeling from a pandemic and its associated economic downturn. The firm announced that advisors will be able to freely access Orion Planning from April 1 through July 1, in hopes that it would enable them to deliver affordable financial planning services to impacted families and businesses within their communities.

“As things started to unfold, we heard heroic stories about the things companies were doing to reach out to the community, and our executive committee had a brain storming session of sorts,” said Clarke. “We decided we would roll out our planning technology, client portal and associated planning workflows not only to our advisors free of charge, but to any financial advisor for them to leverage, and to encourage them to reach out to members of their communities that had been impacted by the virus and offer some peace of mind and reduce anxiety levels as we went through this pandemic.”

The firm also launched an onboarding program for advisors new to cloud-based technology called “Business As Usual,” allowing expedited onboarding and support for users signing on in early April, free access to those users through July 1, and deferred payments through Oct. 30, as well as five free hours of business product support for companies moving from legacy installed software to cloud-based technology. The offering was intended to get advisors onto the platform in time to file their quarter-end audits with Orion’s technology.

Orion also stepped in to provide volatility-related client communication campaign materials for advisors in the initial stages of the downturn.

Orion itself has weathered the crisis well, said Clarke, closing its New York and Seattle offices on March 13, and then moving employees at its other locations to working from home during the next week.

“Among our six different locations across the country, we’ve only had one employee diagnosed with Covid-19, from our Long Island office,” said Clarke. “They have fully recovered. There have been no other positive diagnoses we’re aware of. We’re really grateful that it didn’t spread, we were in a position to act quickly to protect the health of our teams.”

When the dust clears from the pandemic, Orion’s recent improvements may put it in a position to continue its growth in an industry permanently changed by the experience.

Clarke finds potential precedent in history: Dell Computer came out of the dot-com crash as the computer to buy both for businesses and households.

“Our industry has a challenge we’re facing, whether you’re in the business-to-business side that has relied on conferences to generate new business, or on the business-to-consumer side where you’re an advisor working with clients,” said Clarke. “Our traditional business models have relied very much on a face-to-face engagement and interaction. You’ve seen firms invest significant amounts of money into their offices, creating an environment that will help them win opportunities. As we move forward, firms, ourselves included, have to challenge ourselves how we’re going to grow over the next year, over the next year and a half, until we have a vaccine.

“How can we continue to grow our businesses? It’s not okay to simply stay where we’re at, we need to grow, and so we need to challenge this traditional paradigm we’ve all used to make connections with prospects and each other. The steak dinner isn’t there anymore.”