Riskalyze has been integrated with
LPL Financial's ClientWorks platform to provide improved account synchronization and monitoring to the 2,500 LPL advisers who use the digital risk assessment tool.
Advisers now can link clients' Riskalyze profiles with their LPL accounts to produce a seamless data flow that updates information on each program automatically and in real time.
Alex Chalekian, the founder and CEO of Lake Avenue Financial, said the integration will save "countless hours" spent manually uploading and updating information across the two platforms.
"Besides saving time, this seamless link will help ensure that the data is accurate and allows advisers to monitor the accounts in a more efficient manner," Mr. Chalekian said, calling the news a step in the right direction. "This integration has been a long time coming."
Jamie Cox, managing partner at Harris Financial Group, has been using Riskalyze for four years and calls it an integral part of both his client discovery process and ongoing portfolio maintenance. He thinks the real value of integration will be for advisers who use Autopilot, Riskalyze's digital advice tool, which includes online client onboarding and automatic rebalancing.
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"What's most important is that the portfolio positions will now update automatically," Mr. Cox said. "Previously we would have to update Riskalyze any time a portfolio change was made at LPL. The time improvement is going to be dramatic."
The integration also marks a departure in strategy for LPL. Though Riskalyze and other third-party technology vendors have long participated in LPL's vendor affinity program, the broker-dealer traditionally has guarded its data and favored technology products built in-house.
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LPL chief investment officer Burt White
cited the Riskalyze update as an example of the firm's new open-architecture approach to technology.
"We want advisers to have more choice in the tools and resources they can use to support the unique needs of their business," he said in a statement.
In this regard, LPL is playing catch-up. Other custodians, broker-dealers and turnkey asset management platforms already embrace, to varying degrees, open-architecture ecosystems, which allow advisers to pick and choose the tech products they like best and plug them into a common data infrastructure.
But LPL has increased liability due to its role as both a broker-dealer and custodian, and it wanted to ensure data would be secure before turning it over to third parties, Mr. Cox said. He and other many other LPL advisers had been calling for integrations for some time, but the pushback was always around data integrity and security.
"This means, in my view, that LPL is comfortable with its data strategy," Mr. Cox said, commending Mr. White and LPL CEO Dan Arnold. "I think this is going to be more the norm now … The decision to integrate had to come after the decision to protect your information, and they got that right."
Riskalyze was not available for comment by press time.
