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July 28, 2014 at 02:02 PM
Trust Company of America announced on Tuesday that it has expanded its technology platform, Liberty, to work on all mobile devices.
Advisors will be able to access model management, consolidated asset management, and model processing and rebalancing. They can also see information at the account level as well as the entire book of business.
“What we’re really excited about is that we can say now that our entire platform is running on mobility,” Dennis Noto, chief technology officer for Trust Company of America, told ThinkAdvisor on Wednesday.
What makes the platform unique, according to Noto, is the ability to have unlimited models in an account. That capability is “much different from investment strategies or sleeves that other custodians may call it and opening separate accounts based on strategy,” he told ThinkAdvisor on Wednesday. “We truly allow you to spread this into different accounts so you can decide how your models are going to be allocated across households and across individual accounts.”
Mark Piquette, chief marketing officer for TCA, offered an example. “We had an advisor who recently came over to us, and under his old technology provider, in order to have the models how he wanted them, he had to have 1,500 accounts open. When he came over to us, he didn’t need to open an account for every model. He was able to consolidate that to about 900.”
He added, “Think about how much more efficient your back office becomes when you don’t have to have an account for every model.”
In addition to the modeling capabilities, Noto said, advisors can “rebalance across several different ideas, whether you’re investing to goal or divesting” so they can manage their models “seamlessly in roughly seconds.”
Furthermore, for advisors who are active traders, the platform offers robust trade execution controls, Noto said. “When you’re working models and releasing a lot of trades to the marketplace, you want to be able to have that control down at the execution provider,” he said.
Noto stressed the importance of building a platform that is easy to navigate and intuitive. “We laid down real strict guidelines on how we fail and how we pass” at building a good tech application, he said. “If you have to pick up a user manual, we’re going to fail the application, because if it isn’t intuitive enough to know how to use it within a minute or two, we’ve overloaded it with too much complexity.
