Orion's Latest Tech Updates Empower Financial Planners, Chief Compliance Officers
As part of the updates, advisors no longer need to advisors to manage several different billing applications.
Orion Advisor Services enhanced several features of its software, including in-app billing, compliance automation and dynamic retirement reporting.
According to Orion, the updates will better support firms in their shift to offer more advice-driven services, work more seamlessly between critical applications, and streamline compliance oversight obligations.
The update to Orion’s Bill Pay service eliminates the need for advisors to manage several different billing applications.
Orion now allows for unified billing for financial planning. With this update, advisors can now generate bills through their Billing Generator app for a variety of one-time and recurring fees beyond traditional investment management fees, including financial planning, tax planning, estate planning, and more.
By consolidating the billing for both investment management and financial planning services within a single application, advisors can create a consistent process for multiple fee types, streamline reporting, and scale their billing operations, according to Orion.
These enhancements complement Orion’s existing capabilities which enable clients to view and pay bills directly online via secure credit card or ACH processing, providing advisors with a compliant fee-billing solution.
According to Eric Clarke, CEO of Orion, “the update to our Bill Pay feature simplifies an advisor’s workflow and creates a comprehensive picture of a firm’s revenue all within the Orion platform.”
In March, Orion released a comprehensive suite of compliance solutions called Compass. Several enhancements have been made to Compass’ functionality, including the addition of a new feature called Supervise.
With Supervise, a compliance officer can schedule automated exception reports and compliance testing data queries, eliminating cumbersome manual compliance reviews.
According to Kylee Beach, general counsel of Orion, “the addition of Supervise frees compliance teams from time-intensive, manual data entry so they can concentrate on staying ahead of the ever-shifting regulatory environment and protecting their business from potential threats.”
Orion also strengthened Compass’ anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities in Verify, a LexisNexis Risk Solutions-integrated screening service.
In line with Orion’s work to support advisors who provide financial planning to clients, Orion added iRetire by BlackRock to its lineup of existing planning integrations.
iRetire, which is powered by client data and BlackRock’s retirement income indexes, generates dynamic reports to illustrate clients’ different retirement income scenarios. This is available at no additional cost to Orion advisors.
According to Orion, the iRetire tool’s proven ability to jump-start crucial conversations with clients about their retirement strategies is a valuable addition to Orion’s services.
— Check out Orion’s New ‘Compass’ Automates RIA Compliance on ThinkAdvisor.