Interactive Advisory Software, has officially unveiled version 5.0 of its Solution 360 at the TD Ameritrade Institutional conference being held in Orlando this week.
For those unaware Solution 360 was one of the first all-in-one platforms available to the registered investment adviser segment.
During a recent meeting in New York IAS chief executive John Philpott told me the company's sweetspot was registered investment advisory firms that have less than $8 billion in assets under management.
While $0 to $8 billion is a pretty broad range he said that the company had begun seeing significant interest among breakaway brokers establishing their own firms — especially among those that wanted a highly integrated system similar, in terms of its breadth and comprehensiveness, to what they had left at their wirehouses.
“From our standpoint one of our great advantages is that we are not beholden to any custodian in particular,” he said referring to how IAS can take in client data feeds from any custodian.
About 200 advisory firms are using IAS around the country.
Solution 360's original claim to fame was its unique architecture; IAS provides all the core tools and applications an advisory firm needs, all of it running off of a single central database.
“Our founding philosophy was to basically put the client in the center and build the application around them,” said Mr. Philpott.
While many of its original installations were on-premises almost all of the firm's client base has shifted to the software-as-a-service model.
(Watch INTV for more technology news revealed at today's TDAI event.)
With the major version 5.0 refresh come the fruits of the firm's NextGen User Experience Project, developed in response to feedback from IAS's clients.
The interface design itself was formally
rolled out and announced at the company's annual user conference in June.
I am anxious to hear from advisers what they think of the interface as a lot of the anecdotal complaints I have received from advisers over the years regarded the system's complexity and that the user interface could, for some users, represent a steep learning curve.
To address the latter IAS partnered with Spring Studio, a user research and online experience design firm.
The updated interface is supposed to be simplified and far more intuitive (I will check this out myself while at the conference Friday).
It is interesting to me that IAS made use of the Google Web Toolkit in its efforts at revamping and optimizing the new interface.
Following the overhaul IAS is supposed to be cross-browser and cross-platform compatible, meaning an adviser accessing the system can get to it from any web-enabled device.
Just last month IAS announced a substantial client win for themselves in the form of Miller/Russell & Associates LLC, based in Phoenix.
The registered investment advisory has three offices in the Southwest, has a total of $1 billion in assets under management and serves both private wealth management and institutional clients.
I corresponded via e-mail with Maureen Rzeppa, chief administrative officer at Miller/Russell to get a little more background after receiving the announcement.
The firm has been undergoing steady growth of late, and had recently added a tax practice she said, adding that all this combined necessitated a move to something new away from Advent Axys and the no longer supported Qube CRM system (also from Advent) to IAS.
TAMARAC INTEGRATIONS
I am also anxious to get a look at some new integration between the
Advisor Xi platform of Tamarac Inc. and TD's Veo account management system, which I believe will be on display at either Tamarac's booth or as part of TD's partner pavilion.
Specifically, Tamarac will be automatically receiving real-time alerts, holdings, transactions and account balances from Veo, which will feed directly into the former's performance reporting and
portfolio management application, Advisor View, as well as feed into Advisor CRM.
This should enable a lot of workflow development within Advisor CRM (a highly customized version of Microsoft Dynamics).
Additionally, advisers will be able to conduct straight-through processing directly from Tamarac's Advisor Rebalancing application with TD's Veo system.
Stay tuned.
Related stories:
Interactive Advisory Software rolling out new interface
Tamarac announces availability of Advisor Xi
