Orion expands advisor trading, keeps oversight with firms

Orion Advisor Solutions is giving individual financial advisors direct access to the same trading and rebalancing engine that powers its largest institutional clients, the Omaha-based wealthtech firm said Tuesday, as more RIAs push to let advisors manage client portfolios themselves without sacrificing firm-level control.

The expanded offering, called Advisor Trading, builds a version of Orion's enterprise trading technology into a workflow designed for how individual advisors operate day to day, rather than requiring firms to route every order through a centralized trading desk. Firms retain the ability to decide exactly which features, or portions of features, each advisor can use.

"Firms have been asking us for a clear path to let their advisors trade directly, without giving up oversight or standing up a separate system," said Trent Mumma, Orion's chief product officer, in a statement. "This is the same trading and rebalancing engine our largest firms run every day, tailored to a workflow built for how advisors actually work."

The push comes as consolidation reshapes the RIA landscape, with larger aggregator firms gobbling up smaller practices whose advisors may be used to trading on their own rather than outsourcing to firm-approved models. Orion said Advisor Trading is built with that scenario in mind, allowing firms acquiring independent RIAs to preserve an advisor's existing workflow rather than forcing a drastic shift to a centralized desk.

The tool is linked to Orion's Portfolio View and works across every custodian the company supports, according to the announcement. It also carries over tax-management capabilities Orion has built into its broader platform, including tax-loss harvesting, wash-sale prevention and capital-gains budgeting, intended to limit the tax drag firms face when shifting newly onboarded accounts into new models. Where custodians support it, advisors can also trade in fractional shares to implement models to the dollar rather than rounding to whole shares.

Read more: Orion touts fractional share trading for advisors who custody with Schwab

Orion said it plans to add an AI Trading Assistant later this year that would let advisors use natural language to manage trading preferences, review the previous day's trades for anomalies or unexecuted orders, and support pre- and post-trade review.

It's been a busy summer with many milemarkers on Orion's product launch roadmap. Among the most recent developments, Orion added BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard to its Tailored Allocation Portfolios lineup this month, expanding a shelf that pairs third-party models with its custom indexing technology for tax-aware transitions.

The company has also worked to speed up the account-opening process that typically precedes any trading activity. In late July, Orion launched a digital account-opening workflow built into its advisor portal, with Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions as its first integrated custodian, aimed at cutting the gap between when an advisor signs onto a platform and when client accounts actually go live.

The company's combined technology platform now supports more than 8.6 million client accounts and roughly $6.6 trillion in assets under administration as of June 30, up 29% from the $5 trillion mark it crossed a year earlier. 

Read more: Orion hits asset milestone, ramps up Denali AI capabilities

In the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, Orion Advisor Services led all vendors in the trading and rebalancing category for the number of respondents who said they were considering the platform. It already holds a 10.46% share of that category, up from about 9.59% a year earlier, with a solid 7.78 average user rating.