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May 04, 2016 at 07:31 AM
Morningstar launched a new personal financial management portal for its account aggregation service, Morningstar ByAllAccounts, on Tuesday.
The new portal is a mobile-ready, customizable dashboard that pulls together all of an investor’s accounts and updates them daily, giving financial advisors and their home offices a more intuitive and aggregated way to show clients their entire balance sheet.
“Why are we doing this? It’s a pure response from the clients that we serve, and we’re not trying to compete with other portals out there for the sake of competing,” James Carney, head of ByAllAccounts, told ThinkAdvisor.
This is why the portal allows firms that already have portals to augment their existing portals with components from Morningstar ByAllAccounts. These firms can choose any of the portal’s elements as stand-alone tools.
“We looked much broader and said we think people can use pieces of this in their existing portal, so it’s a different strategy that most other firms have,” Carney said, adding, “We didn’t do it for the sake of doing it. This was really done based on demand. That’s why it was designed a certain way to meet the demand that we saw in the market. Using the components was a very important part of the demand because firms making a decision to change their portal – that’s a big decision.”
The new portal includes drag-and-drop functionality that looks at an investor’s total wealth, balance sheet, cash flows and asset allocation. It includes customized report generation and document vault, and it can alert investors if their asset allocation is no longer in balance, funds are transferred out of an account, or a deposit is made to an account. Advisors can also customize branding of the portal and use it to analyze their entire book of business.
The portal was designed to meet three levels of users – the end investor, the advisor and the home office, which Carney said could be an RIA firm that has multiple offices or a broker dealer that has a home office.
