Close Close
Popular Financial Topics Discover relevant content from across the suite of ALM legal publications From the Industry More content from ThinkAdvisor and select sponsors Investment Advisor Issue Gallery Read digital editions of Investment Advisor Magazine Tax Facts Get clear, current, and reliable answers to pressing tax questions
Luminaries Awards
ThinkAdvisor

Technology > Marketing Technology

News From Veo Village – Top Tech Developments From National LINC

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

As the largest gathering of the advisor technology community outside Joel Bruckenstein’s T3 conferences, TD Ameritrade’s “Veo Village” featured the latest and greatest in advisor tech in 2017.

Held in early February at the TDAI LINC conference in San Diego, Veo Village features the best of the 115 technology vendors who have integrated their systems and software with TDAI’s innovative Veo advisor workstation.

(Check out ThinkAdvisor’s coverage of the National LINC conference.)

This year, over 70 tech partners demonstrated their wares at the TDAI LINC conference in an expo that took up nearly the entire second floor of the massive Manchester Grand Hyatt.

“When we launched the Veo Open Access integration project seven years ago, we had about five vendors initially,” said Jon Patullo, managing director of technology for TDAI, said. “This year we have 115 integration partners and, due to space constraints, were limited to 70 with a long waiting list.”

Key to success for TDAI’s initiative is the innovative use of application program interfaces (APIs) to automate the process of passing data between systems.

“The real benefit of opening up the Veo API is now we have 115 development teams working on efficiencies for advisors – the collective weight of the entire advisor technology community is focused, providing tremendous leverage for advisors,” noted Chris Valleley, director of technology solutions for TDAI.

Top of the list for the news out of the Veo Village was the official launch of TDAI’s integration platform, Veo One, with 14 integrated technology partners, including CRM vendors Junxure, Redtail and Salesforce; financial planning systems eMoney, Envestnet Logix and Money Guide Pro; portfolio management platforms SS&C Advent’s Black Diamond, Morningstar and Orion; along with DocuSign, Laser App and Laserfiche for workflow automation and document management. Rounding out the new integrations are TDAI’s iRebal rebalancer and ThinkPipes trading platform.

Veo One is TDAI’s response to a tall order from advisors: to create operational efficiencies by enabling them to work in one environment and one interface with single sign-on to all of the programs they use to work with clients, manage investments and automatically update financial plans.

Data from one application such as a CRM can now be automatically updated at TDAI in Veo One, as well as other applications in a bi-directional manner, saving advisors time, improving accuracy and delivering needed efficiencies.

New Vendor Developments 

From the technology vendor side, top news coming out of the Veo Village included SS&C Advent’s new partnership with HedgeCoVest to provide their SMArt Xchange (SMArtX) exclusively to SS&C’s client base of advisors using Black Diamond.

(Related: SS&C, HedgeCoVest Integrate on Tech Platform, Managed Account Offering)

This managed account integration allows for seamless, sleeve-level reporting and portfolio accounting of all SMArtX accounts through Black Diamond. Advisors gain access to long only, long-short and options strategies, which are allocated into a single brokerage account. The SMArtX service uses proprietary technology to maintain a real-time record of investment managers’ activity and automatically creates trades to sync investors’ portfolios with the investment managers’ trading strategies.

Taking the integration approach to an entirely different level was CRM and wealth management platform Grendel. Through Grendel’s multiple integration touch points, this latest update to Grendel takes advantage of virtually every integration point TD Ameritrade makes available through its API. As a result, advisors will have one complete, integrated system that combines CRM with portfolio management, performance reporting, trading and rebalancing.

Through Grendel’s multiple integrations with TD Ameritrade’s Veo Open Access API, advisors will be able to actively manage client relationships, trade accounts, perform cash transfers, generate fee billings, see household wealth views and more for their TD Ameritrade accounts and not have to toggle back and forth through multiple systems and screens.

As for new entrants into the Veo Village, new robo-advisor InvestmentPOD, a highly sophisticated robo platform that automates active, passive and defensive strategies made an impression. Founded by former Goldman Sachs wealth advisor and investment banker, Jacqueline Ko Mathews, InvestmentPOD was engaging with advisors looking for a premium robo platform.

Orion joined in on the API fun with an advanced integration with its Notifications app into TDAI’s Open Access Advanced Alerts platform. Through this latest integration, real-time notifications of events on the TDAI platform are now directly accessible to advisors through the Orion Notifications app.

Going forward, Patullo and Valleley are building on their momentum to take the Veo initiative to the next level with integrations of artificial intelligence (AI), voice recognition and virtual reality. “Our Technology Group is a think tank that is incubating ideas such as how we can integrate Amazon’s Alexa to become an alternative interface for advisors to interact with their data, our systems and integration partners,” Patullo said.

On the operational front, Valleley is rolling out a new Account Wizard API that will provide advisors with a real-time account number. “Sometimes the simplest of things bring the biggest benefits, as advisors can start the transfer process right away and not have to wait for paperwork to engage with their new clients.”

To learn more about all of the other developments that went on at the Veo Village and the LINC conference, check out the #NationalLINC hashtag on Twitter.

— Read Momentum Growing for Robotics at Asset Servicers on ThinkAdvisor.


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.