How a small custodian competes

Trust Company of America is building a future-oriented interface

With all the big technology initiatives at the major custodians, I found refreshing a conversation I had recently with Dennis Noto, chief information officer at Trust Company of America.

With 120 advisory firms using its custody services and $10 billion in assets, TCA remains relatively small fry. By comparison, The Charles Schwab Corp. boasted 6,000 retail advisory firms, $609.9 billion in total adviser-directed assets and $1.47 trillion of total client assets at the end of the third quarter.

Despite its size, plucky TCA is building a core technology offering that it hopes will appeal to advisers who are looking to grow quickly. Taking advantage of seismic shifts in the way that web architectures are built and web services are delivered, TCA has started with a small, clean slate and built from there, rather than patching or building conduits between disparate systems, as has been the case with several major custodians.

With his interface design, Mr. Noto said that he hopes to achieve for financial advisers what Apple Inc. has done for consumers.

“Advisers don’t have to use a user manual to run our interface. Within three mouse clicks, you can trade your whole book of business,” Mr. Noto said.

He not only can make the marketing case for his service, he actually can program and code himself, a pretty rare skill for any C-level executive, let alone one outside a pure technology company.

(During our chat, Mr. Noto whipped out his iPhone and took me through a quick demonstration of an app he built for his wife to do cooking-related measurement conversions such as ounces to grams and the like. He noted proudly that it has been downloaded 3,000 times.)

TCA has kept the needs of the adviser and the end client in mind in building its new interface, which will allow for simple-to-use adviser branding and customization. The firm has engaged the glitzy user interface design company Wall Street on Demand to help with these efforts.

Underneath the aesthetics, the interface uses enterprise JavaServer Faces technology, which makes it easier for TCA to build or add to existing interfaces in ways that don’t burden the user.

Among its other projects are integration with an “industry-leading performance-reporting engine” (mum remains the word on this, for the moment) to provide benchmarking against market indexes, hooks for which will be embedded into the interface.

TCA also is building asset aggregation into its platform, permitting advisers to report performance on all client assets, regardless of custodian. This will eliminate the need for its registered investment advisory customers to subscribe to several data services, as many advisers do now.

The company also has built its own real-time reporting feature and linked it to its trading engine, a feature that will help advisers make tax-advantaged trades when necessary. The system also is fully compliant with the new IRS cost basis requirements that go into effect in January.

TECH UNDER THE TREE

This week, I am beginning a series of product reviews to acquaint you with new technology products and services that may make good holi- day gifts. I will post additional gift ideas on the InvestmentNews.com/technology blog as well.

This week, our gift idea is a secure portable hard drive, the Apricorn Aegis Padlock, from Apricorn Inc.

The company sent me the 756 gigabyte model, which is listed at $199 and features a configurable keypad for setting up your own PIN number. It has real-time 256-bit or 128-bit hardware encryption (your choice).

Keeping client data safe has become an important issue, highlighted especially by the theft last February of an LPL Financial adviser’s unencrypted portable hard drive.

Although they haven’t mandated encryption, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. and the Securities and Exchange Commission suggest it as one way to safeguard client data. On the state regulatory level, privacy laws in Massachusetts and Nevada require the encryption of electronically stored or transmitted personal data.

The Aegis tool is a low-cost and easy-to-use solution to the encryption problem. It was very simple to set up, requiring just a few minutes to change the default PIN to my own.

Otherwise, it works like any other portable USB hard drive that plugs into your computer and appears as an additional drive.

Visit the blog for more details including a brief slide show, links to the company’s website, a few alternative models from competitors, and links to other stories on the importance of encryption.

E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].