Advisor Software
Enabling Financial Institutions Revamp Digitally

In the financial arena today, FinTech startups and IBDs play a vital role when it comes to helping clients with their wealth management endeavors. For this purpose, most of these organizations seek the help of financial advisors to optimize their operations, perform accurate risk analysis, and evaluate the costs and benefits of building financial assets to enhance business outcomes. This, in turn, puts financial advisors in the position of asset managers, financial planners, and marketers; but in many ways, they fall short of meeting the needs of their clients due to the lack of a technical edge. To this end, Advisor Software steps in as one of the leading specialist firms with enhanced expertise in analytics to help both financial institutions as well as IBDs to build risk-based applications and identify risk portfolios effectively.

In discussion with CIO Applications, Andrew Rudd, the CEO of Advisor Software, speaks about the Digital Advisor platform, which efficiently enables financial organizations and wealth managers to serve their clients in a flexible and scalable manner. The several computational routines within the platform help clients build portfolios and provide high-quality applications for enhanced operations of the clients. “Our Digital Advisor platform provides a suite of functionalities, all very modular, to allow clients to utilize the entire platform or segments of it,” begins Rudd.

Please talk about the typical clients you cater to, and the challenges that Advisor Software mitigates for them.

From a clientele perspective, we cover a wide spectrum starting from FinTech startups who are trying to digitize their operations right up till the advanced and independent advisory firms, and IBDs, who offer services to financial organizations. Our Digital Advisor platform operates on both the B2B and B2B2C models. It provides turnkey automated investment solutions and helps in lead generation and risk portfolio selection. It further allows clients to meet advisory needs and facilitate seamless customer onboarding, proposal generation, portfolio creation, and investment analytics. We always strive to meet the needs of our clients at every step of the way, irrespective of the segment of the financial services industry that they belongs to.

Can you elaborate on the Digital Advisor platform and its key benefits?

The Digital Advisor platform enables financial advisors and wealth managers to provide digital advice to clients to grow their business by tying together investment experience with digitization. The client acquisition module of the platform enables swift proposal generation. The analytics accessible by the advisor provides a comprehensive evaluation and recommendation based on the clients’ existing portfolio. Our workflows help clients and advisors to work towards formulating successful financial plans, which is further enhanced by regular alerts and client portal updates. The clients also receive customizable reports, including balance sheets and cash flow analysis, to help them further gauge their current status and optimize their performance accordingly.

Clients can easily monitor and balance their entire business in a matter of a few days with the tax-aware portfolio rebalancing feature. Along with this, the platform also enables the ability to measure a user’s behavior and knowledge and help them arrive at appropriate financial decisions.

Could you give us more insights on the API infrastructure model that the Digital Advisor platform is based on?

Our platform incorporates several different types of APIs, directed toward resolving clients’ wealth management issues and deploying new financial solutions effectively. Clients can choose to use these APIs individually or collectively with which they can build their own platforms. The APIs help in the account opening process, portfolio analytics, portfolio rebalancing, and other financial activities. For instance, we provide the Monte Carlo Simulation API to help run multiple simulations on any of the portfolios, which allows receiving wealth projections and risk-and-return metrics for each portfolio. The Portfolio Shocker API helps analyze significant market trends of the past against the existing portfolio to relatively measure performance impacts. The platform also offers Portfolio Rebalancer, risk and return API, and Efficient frontier API, to rebalance several accounts within a short period, to analyze the cumulative risk and returns over a while, and to compare and determine efficient portfolios.

What does the client onboarding process look like at Advisor Software?

There exist several segments to the onboarding process we follow at Advisor Software. We usually focus on the user experience while offering our platform, which is equipped with an administrative section allowing users to organize it either for a B2B or a B2B2C model. The aspects of different settings and configurations in terms of the models, universities, capital market consumption can be easily aligned to the needs of the individual advisor or firm. The platform is entirely configurable. It ensures that clients meet the branding needs of its end-customers while maximizing the delivery of a single platform by making operational functions, such as administrating models, portfolios, and financial planning, more efficient. The entire implementation process can be completed within a couple of days and can be accessed from any location, across any device.

Can you cite a customer success story that showcases the success of Advisor Software with a particular client?

One of the many success stories we’ve had was with an established IRA, who opted for the Digital Advisor automated sales module, through which we assisted the client to build a platform to expand their client offerings. Additionally, we also helped them market their capabilities through regional banks to increase their client base. They were able to digitally onboard clients and shift customers from basic savings to advanced savings with value-added investment advice, all of it in a short time. Apart from this, we are also working with several other firms, who, through our platform, have been able to automate their proposal generation process in a paperless and error-free manner, to easily onboard higher numbers of investors, on behalf of the large financial institutions.

What does the future look like for Advisor Software in the financial arena?

Being in business for about 20 years has allowed us to have a robust analytical drive to resolve a variety of issues for financial organizations. With a great focus on optimization, risk analysis, and the cost and benefits of several investments in building portfolios, we are meeting the needs of our clients with over 250 APIs and our large data analytics repository. I think we have provided a pretty good thickness of coverage of the equity markets. Looking ahead, we will put together APIs for various applications to build a stronger base for us. We always have kept a keen eye on the changing wave of technology, and we evolve with the growth of AI and ML and take up the role of comprehending how the advice we provide needs to align with the services required by the clients and continuously build the client-advisor relationship.