In order to manage investments for their clients, financial advisors need a minimum of three things. First, they need a custodian that both serves as a broker-dealer to execute client trades as well as the custodian keeping the ledgers of client accounts to verify their holdings, position values, cost basis, etc. Second, they need a trading and rebalancing tool that can monitor client portfolios against their asset allocation targets, calculate trades when rebalancing occurs, and provide a trade order file for the custodian to execute (or send the trades directly to the custodian directly). And third, the advisor needs a portfolio accounting and reporting tool that can calculate and generate reports showing the client's investment performance, as well as calculate AUM fees accurately to align with the advisor's fee schedule. There are other categories of software under the portfolio management umbrella as well – investment research tools, held-away assets and account aggregation, risk tolerance questionnaires, etc. – but those three are essentially what's needed to get off the ground.
Originally, the technology that came along to perform these essential investment management functions evolved separately from each other. 20 years ago, an advisor would have one tool for their performance reporting and another for trading and rebalancing, in addition to their custodian which likely had few technology tools of its own. But starting in the mid-2010s, a consolidation of portfolio management technology began to occur, starting with iRebal's acquisition by TDAmeritrade. Providers like Orion and Black Diamond, which had originally arose as performance reporting-only tools, began to build or buy their own integrated rebalancing tools. Others, like Morningstar Office and later Advyzon (from the same team that had originally built Office), built all-in-one portfolio management tools from the ground up. But in either case, where it was once the norm to use multiple tools for implementing and monitoring investment management, it was now becoming increasingly common to rely on a single tool for rebalancing, trading, performance reporting, and billing (although in most cases the custodial function remained separate from the others for the actual trade execution).
One of the early standalone rebalancing tools was RedBlack. In late 2019, RedBlack was acquired by the asset manager Invesco as part of a buying spree of advisor technology aimed at boosting the distribution of Invesco funds through the RIA channel (and the tail end of the broader trend of consolidating standalone rebalancers, where RedBlack was one of the last to be acquired). Eventually, Invesco consolidated its various acquisitions (including the robo advisor Jemstep and another rebalancing tool, Portfolio Pathways) under the Intelliflo brand as an all-in-one portfolio management solution. The problem, however, was that Intelliflo was primarily a UK brand with little penetration or recognition in the US. And so while Intelliflo found solid usage overseas, it had little traction in the US, with the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology finding it with a less than 0.5% adoption rate among advisors.
Last year, however, the news broke that Invesco is selling its Intelliflo business to the PE firm Carlyle. In the process, Intelliflo is also separating its UK-focused business from its US side, where the US rebalancing software has been rebranded back to its original RedBlack name.
In other words, RedBlack is back on the market as a standalone trading and rebalancing tool. And after all the consolidation and building of all-in-one portfolio solutions over the years since it was first acquired, RedBlack becomes one of the few remaining standalone rebalancing tools left on the Kitces AdvisorTech Map. In fact, of the eight remaining companies in the Trading/Rebalancing category, one (iRebal) is no longer available as a standalone tool following Charles Schwab's acquisition of TDAmeritrade; one (Blaze Portfolio) is set to wind down at the end of 2025; two (Smartleaf and Alphathena) are more about personalized direct indexing than generalized rebalancing; and one (SEI LifeYield) is billed as a "householding" tool for complex multi-account and multi-custodial portfolio situations. Leaving only RedBlack, Flyer Financial Technologies, and SoftPak as the three 'true' standalone rebalancing solutions left on the market!
Which begs the question of which RIAs really need a standalone portfolio rebalancing tool in 2025? There has been plenty of debate over the years between proponents of multifunctional "all-in-one" tools versus "best in class" standalone solutions, but the evolution of portfolio management technology over that time has clearly shown that advisors prefer a single tool for rebalancing, reporting, and billing, both for the depth of integrations and often simply because it's less expensive than buying each separately. And even if advisors did decide to adopt a standalone rebalancing tool like RedBlack, they'd still need to pair it with a standalone performance reporting tool, which is itself a category that has shrunken greatly over time as its providers have been consolidated into more holistic portfolio management platforms.
It appears there are essentially three paths forward for tools like RedBlack. They could either develop some trading capabilities that are more sophisticated and complex than what the existing all-in-one tools like Orion, Black Diamond, and Advyzon can do – e.g., something in line with Smartleaf and Alphathena's direct indexing solution or SEI LifeYield's householding tools – which would involve finding some part of the market that isn't being served capably by other solutions and building in that direction to differentiate itself. Alternatively, RedBlack could build out its performance reporting capabilities to more directly compete with the all-in-one portfolio management solutions (effectively becoming one itself) – which is a daunting proposition given how fierce the competition between the existing tools, and yet there could be room in the market for a 'lighter' portfolio rebalancing tool that doesn't include CRM, client portals, risk tolerance, and the myriad other tools that many all-in-ones pack into their solutions. Otherwise, RedBlack could find itself facing the third alternative scenario, which is being re-acquired – either by an existing tool in the portfolio management category, a standalone performance reporting tool (e.g., AssetBook or EZFol.io) that wants to acquire the capabilities to become a full-fledged portfolio management solution, or by another asset manager looking for an advisor-facing solution to distribute its products.
In the end, though, what's striking about how portfolio management technology has evolved since RedBlack's original acquisition is how, despite the high cost of independent all-in-one portfolio rebalancing tools (which can run into tens of thousands of dollars annually even for a medium-sized advisory firm), advisors have largely rejected the idea of AdvisorTech solutions owned by asset managers, including not only RedBlack but also BlackRock's version of Future Advisor, which it shut down in 2023 eight years after buying the robo-advisor platform. Although advisors certainly factor cost and ease of use into their technology decisions, independence – and being free from entanglements from asset managers seeking to boost distribution of their own products – is clearly a red line that many independent advisors won't cross when they're obliged to act in their clients' best interests.
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces is the Chief Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning and helping to make financial advisors better and more successful. In addition, he is the Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, the co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, New Planner Recruiting, fpPathfinder, and FA BeanCounters, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View.
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