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.”