With the launch of WealthOne, National Planning Holdings Inc.'s network of four broker-dealers has a major new set of tools at its disposal.
The web-based advisory platform, which was unveiled today, will provide the network's 3,700 registered representatives with a wide array of investment strategies and products from big-name money management firms and managers.
“What this platform does is make it easier for an adviser to outsource a lot of the strategic asset management or better align that management to what their interests are,” said Jeffrey Strange, a senior analyst at Cerulli Associates Inc.
Following three years of development, WealthOne will be available to all NPH-affiliated advisers and represents three distinct solutions available on a single platform.
From the platform's starting point, the Advisory Portal, registered reps can view client information, create and update investment proposals, build and manage portfolio models, research strategists, and access reference materials and industry commentaries. Advisers can also customize the client access site and client reports with their own branding.
NPH chief executive Jim Livingston explained that this project is a central component of the broker-dealer network's growth strategy.
“We are recruiting across all channels — wirehouses, banks, broker-dealers — and everyone we contact all want to do fee-based business,” he said.
“We've built a unified platform for each of three key types of adviser. There's the rep-as-money-manager leg, the separately managed account leg, and the rep-as-asset-gatherer leg,” said Mr. Livingston, who believes that this will appeal to a cross section of advisers.
From the Advisory Portal, advisers can access any of the three platform components.
The first component, Strategist Solutions, gives advisers access to strategic and tactical asset managers from Avatar Associates LLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co.,
Lazard Ltd., Loring Ward, Russell Investments, Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC,
UBS AG and
The Vanguard Group Inc.
Reps also have “single click” access from the Advisory Portal to WealthOne's other two components, Advisor Solutions and Custom Style Portfolio Solutions.
With Advisor Solutions, asset managers can build and maintain model portfolios by creating their own custom asset allocations. This portion of the platform provides advisers with re-balancing and the ability to set drift parameters, an investment proposal generation system and customized quarterly performance reporting.
A differentiating feature of Advisor Solutions is that it provides NPH representatives with consolidated quarterly reporting and billing statements for clients. This means that clients receive just one set of statements for all their accounts, as opposed to the multiple sets from different parties that occur when broker-dealers use third-party managers.
“Vendors plus duct tape” is how Rob Dearman, senior vice president of advisory practice and platforms strategy for NPH, describes the broker-dealer industry's other attempts at putting together similar platforms.
Mr. Dearman said that WealthOne was built in-house by the company's 32-person development team using custom programming and XML. He explained that NPH collaborated with Envestnet, an established turnkey asset management technology provider, in designing the solutions that make up the platform, shorten the development time and prevent the teething pains experienced by others.
It is precisely a lack of those pains, in addition to the flexibility and ease of use, that have most impressed adviser Alex Vasilantone Jr. He is both president of U.S. Advisory LLC and supervises its office of supervisory jurisdiction, and was referred to
InvestmentNews by NPH.
“Being able to go on [the platform] and generate a proposal, really within seconds, and then over to the electronic-order entry system where they even have a pre-populated account-opening form as well as the ability to get an e-signature from the client — this all makes it a lot easier to track and approve things,” Mr. Vasilantone said.
His firm, which manages about $250 million, works with National Planning Corp., one of four broker-dealers in the NPH network.
Mr. Strange said that while the new platform will help NPH hold on to its advisers, especially those desiring to expand into fee-based asset management, it remains an open question as to how this will affect the recruiting of outside brokers or wirehouse breakaways.
“I don't know how revolutionary it is, but what it does is dovetail with two things we are seeing within the broader industry” — providing streamlined access to third-party strategists and making it more transparent for the adviser to see what the investment manager is doing, he said.
“It looks like they achieved what they had set out to do,” Mr. Strange added.
E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].
