Unified wealth management platform announced by Fiserv

OCT 18, 2011
Fiserv today announced that its new Unified Wealth Management Platform is now available for its clients, in the case of InvestmentNews readers this means advisers and asset managers. The announcement comes after 22 months of development, its acquisition of AdviceAmerica and an interim milestone press release or two. Since getting the statement I have gone back and re-read and tried to digest some previous announcements and stories so I can provide a little context. Here’s the boiled down crux of the release:
    This…moves all managed account programs—including Separately Managed Account (SMA), Mutual Fund Advisory (MFA), Rep as Portfolio Manager (RPM) and Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) — onto one, managed account platform… The new managed account solution from Fiserv will operate as a product-agnostic platform or chassis. Multi-sleeve accounts will continue to work as they do today. Traditional SMAs, MFAs, RPMs and ETFs will be set up as a sleeve or strategies, and clients will have the ability to seamlessly transition from single- to multi-sleeve products.
In mid-2010 Fiserv acquired AdviceAmerica and its front-office financial planning, retirement income planning, customer relationship management, proposal-generation and plan-marketing capabilities and has since been working to integrate those. For those unfamiliar, AdviceAmrica was a provider of integrated financial advice systems to broker-dealers, independent advisers and insurance companies. In June I spoke with Cheryl Nash, currently interim president of investment services at Fiserv. At that time she said the firm was in the midst of integrating AdviceAmerica’s AdvisorVision financial planning and ClientVision CRM system with Fiserv’s trading platform, reporting, model and management platforms. This is all supposed to be complete and provide advisers with a fully integrated soup-to-nuts platform including CRM and financial planning to managed account services — including true householding features. I’ll expand on this as time allows. I'm most interested in how this positions Fiserv as compared to other managed account providers. I would also like to hear from adivsers what they think, especially those actually on the system during its pilot/beta phase. Feel free to contact me backchannel ([email protected]), on or off the record. For more information visit Fiserv online. Related stories: Real UMH platform on the way? Fiserv gives APL managed-account platform a new look with OneView New version of trading platform launched by Fiserv Fiserv finalizes CheckFree acquisition

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