Swell host: Schwab building cloud version of PortfolioCenter

Schwab Performance Technologies announced today they would be building a hosted version of PortfolioCenter, the company’s widely used…

Schwab Performance Technologies announced today they would be building a hosted version of PortfolioCenter, the company’s widely used portfolio management software.
PortfolioCenter Hosted, as the new product will be named, is meant to meet the increasing need for anytime, anywhere access to portfolio management data, according to Brian Shenson, vice president of advisor technology solutions for Charles Schwab.
Advisers have been clamoring for a cloud-based version of PortfolioCenter for years, and several private third-parties companies have already stepped in to meet that need.
When questioned about whether SPT might be a bit late to the game, Mr. Shenson said that while current outsourcing companies have served the purpose of removing the management burden of maintaining PortfolioCenter for advisory firms, those companies probably lack the depth of experience with the product that SPT has.
“There are certainly pockets of local or regional environments that are hosting but those firms don’t always have the expertise to scale or run the architecture for this product, we think we have an advantage in being able to roll out new features and updates more rapidly as well,” he said in an interview.
Decreasing the time spent on technology infrastructure tasks like software updates and database backups, is part of Schwab’s selling points for advisers with the rollout.
“We are already working on the project and plan to bring it to market by the end of the year,” Mr. Shenson said.
Pricing has not been finalized he said but added that it would be priced at a premium to the desktop product.
“Over the long term we are excited because it is going to allow us to deliver updates directly and not require advisers to have to do apply updates themselves,” said Mr. Shenson.
SPT is a subsidiary of The Charles Schwab Corp.
More than 3500 advisory firms use PortfolioCenter; many of those firms have multi-custodial relationships and end up using PortfolioCenter as their singular portfolio management application — despite hearing many complaints, especially as regards the program’s performance reports.
The latter has seen investment and updates in the last year to the reporting package, with improvements to the look, feel, substance and ability to customize the reports.
Today’s prepared statement stated that “SPT is also continuing to make enhancements to the desktop version of PortfolioCenter, including an upcoming release that will focus on increased ease of use for back office staff and enhanced billing statements for client presentations.”

WAIT THERE’S MORE

In addition to announcing introduction of PortfolioCenter Hosted itself, that application, as well as PortfolioServices (Schwab’s outsourced performance reporting solution) will both be added and integrated into the Schwab OpenView Gateway platform offering.
This is meant to allow those using OpenView Gateway to integrate multi-custodial data and portfolio performance within their client relationship management system (with that platform advisers have a choice of using Junxure from CRM Software Inc., Salesforce.com, or Microsoft Dynamics {or derivatives of the latter such as Salentica}).
“There will be a fair amount of capability in the initial release, including account balance, transaction, asset allocation, management fee information as well as the ability to request reports right out of the CRM,” said Mr. Shenson.
The first application to see these features will be Salesforce, he said, largely because of the two firms’ close relationship working on their turnkey Integrated Office platform, which has that CRM as its centerpiece.
When asked about whether data will be persistent, meaning that the applications will be able to manipulate and store the data themselves, Mr. Shenson said that initially the data would not be persistent data.
“With these initial iterations advisers will just get real-time access, where they can view the data on their screen,” he said.
“For one thing, this insures the security of that data down to access rights, though from within the CRM we will allow users to do look-backs on account information using the calendaring in the CRM to be able to go and look up what a position was on a given date,” he added.