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July 15, 2019 at 11:11 AM
The Skience wealth management digital platform has been “re-architected” to enable advanced efficiency, scalability and configuration, according to the Herndon, Virginia-based company.
The firm, formerly known as The Athene Group, offers wealth management consulting services within Salesforce’s cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
Skience 11.0 allows administrators to easily configure the user experience including application behavior, integrations and data layouts via Skience’s data cloud, “eliminating costly and frustrating delays caused by custom development work,” the company said in its announcement.
Administrators can also add and rearrange elements from data transmissions that are visible in the CRM, giving wealth managers “pinpoint control over information needed to create a comprehensive view of their clients’ wealth,” the company said. The platform can accommodate new business lines as advisors expand their service offerings to support new custodians and product manufacturers and supports future upgrades “seamlessly and inexpensively.”
Skience 11.0 also marks a “significant advancement for our company, as it opens up the possibility for us to extend our business capabilities into new markets,” according to its CEO, Sanjeev Kumar.
VanEck Changes Name of Alternative Energy-Focused ETF
New York City investment firm VanEck changed the name and ticker symbol of the VanEck Vectors Global Alternative Energy ETF, effective July 9.
The new name is VanEck Vectors Low Carbon Energy ETF and the new ticker is SMOG (changed from GEX) and better reflects its energy ETF’s low carbon approach, according to the firm’s news release.
“As climate change and its potential solutions have become more present in our global discourse, the language used by those within the energy sector, as well as those investing in it, has changed and evolved,” according to Ed Lopez, head of ETF Product at VanEck. “What used to be referred to as ‘alternative energy’ is now more commonly referred to as ‘green,’ ‘clean’ or ‘renewable,’ and numerous large public companies in the energy space have acquiesced to investor demands to set more stringent, low carbon, emission standards,” he said in a statement.
The fund has an expense ratio of 0.63% and invests “at least 80% of its total assets in stocks of low-carbon energy companies,” added Lopez. It holds about 30 stocks and tracks the Ardour Global Index Extra Liquid, which focuses on companies involved in the production, transportation and storage of power via environmentally friendly, nontraditional sources such as wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biofuels.
Hartford Funds Introduces AARP Balanced Retirement Fund
The AARP Balanced Retirement Fund expands Hartford Funds’ lineup of multi-strategy mutual funds with an investment strategy that the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based asset manager said was designed to “generate real total return” on a long-term basis while also decreasing downside risk and any impact from inflation on retirement accumulations.
