Trade-pmr, an ria custodian located in Gainesville, Fla., is not among the most widely recognized names in the custody business. But with the release of Fusion, the company’s new, touch-enabled custodial platform, its profile within the industry is certain to rise soon. I recently tried out a beta version of Fusion, and it is without a doubt the most impressive custodial interface I’ve ever seen. It is the only one to date that is built to take advantage of the new Windows 8 touch screen PCs, as well as all touch screen mobile devices.
Clearly, not all of our readers are using Trade-PMR as a custodian, so why should you care about Fusion?
I’m sure that after reading what follows, Trade-PMR hopes you will become a client, but even if you don’t, please read on. Fusion sets a new standard for custodial platforms, and it represents a new benchmark for custodial platforms in the future.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Trade-PMR opened its doors in 1998 to service RIAs. Today, the firm is well equipped to handle the needs of fee-only independent RIAs, but it is equally suited to the needs of dually registered RIAs. Over the last several years, the firm has experienced significant growth. At the beginning of 2009, it serviced approximately 300 advisors. When I wrote about the firm in 2010, it was servicing 563 advisors. Today, it serves more than 1,350 advisors, and I expect its growth to accelerate over the next few years. Some of the recent growth was attributable to the firm’s last-generation custodial platform, eCustody, which I’ve mentioned favorably in the past. Since trading and custody have been to a large extent commoditized, value-added services like technology and practice management support are driving more and more custody decisions. Trade-PMR offers some impressive practice management programs, but Fusion takes the firm’s custody platform to a whole new level.
Trade-PMR has a history of using technology as part of its core value proposition. Over the last six years, Trade-PMR advisors have enjoyed the use of the eCustody platform. eCustody includes most of the core functionality that advisors need to run their businesses, including automated fee deductions, block trading, basic CRM capability, performance reporting and much more.
Increasingly, however, advisors and their clients are demanding the ability to work wherever and whenever they want. The emergence of tablets and smart phones has created an opportunity for a rich, touch-based experience that was unimaginable a few short years ago. Advisors have become accustomed to mice and keyboards when interacting with computing devices, but they leave much to be desired. They are functional, but not ideal. Touch screens can add a whole new dimension to usability.
Of course, you can’t just take an existing application and touch-enable it (well, you can, but you won’t be satisfied with the results). In order to gain the maximum benefit from touch platforms, you need to build an application that is specifically designed to interact with multiple inputs (touch, mouse, keyboard). That is essentially what Trade-PMR has accomplished with Fusion.
Trade-PMR’s new Fusion advisor workstation is perhaps the most flexible, easy-to-use custodial platform ever built. Designed as a touch-first application, Fusion is optimized for devices such as the iPad, Microsoft Surface, Android and the new Windows 8 touch-screen computers, yet it still performs well on non-touch computers running Windows 7 and 8 operating systems.
Fusion uses design principles from Microsoft’s Metro user interface to bring focus to the application’s content, not the interface. The conventional interface may expose as many functions as possible, but it clutters up the screen. Fusion, on the other hand, displays only the most frequently used functions and hides the others. The hidden tools are usually just a touch, a mouse click or a keystroke away.
This results in a clean, user-friendly experience.
The Fusion start page consists of a number of interactive “live tiles,” used both to communicate important information and to help the user navigate. The tiles can be resized and arranged to meet the needs of the user. (See Figure 1.)
All the buttons are large enough to be pressed on a touch screen, but they can also be clicked with a mouse. The result is a balance between the power of a desktop application and the portability of mobile technology.