Fidelity Enhances Bond Beacon: Tech Roundup

What You Need to Know

Oppenheimer launches Investor Gateway wealth management technology platform.
State Street, Charles River Development and Advisor360° announced a strategic partnership
Advyzon launches a new TAMP.

Fidelity Investments added new features and expanded access to Fidelity Bond Beacon, Fidelity Institutional’s digital trading solution that helps financial advisors manage fixed income investing for clients.

Bond Beacon, first offered to a subset of Fidelity Institutional clients in August 2020, is now starting to roll out to all client segments and provides advisors increased visibility into the bond market, the company said Tuesday.

Citing Fidelity research, it said 35% of advisors would find it easier to invest in individual bonds for clients if they had a simplified process to access and trade. Bond Beacon helps address that by using real-time data and analytics to trade against live markets, offering a view into fixed income markets and significantly reducing the time needed for transactions, it added.

Fidelity has “deepened” Bond Beacon’s capabilities, adding new features to offer advisors, broker-dealers and family offices with more support to manage and construct fixed income portfolios, it said.

The platform provides: enhanced liquidity; analytics and data pre-trade, at-trade and post-trade functionality; expanded reporting to support intermediaries and their investor clients; and in-depth, real-time fixed income position and account information with Wealthscape, Fidelity’s advisor technology platform

Oppenheimer Launches Investor Gateway

Oppenheimer & Co. launched the Investor Gateway, an interconnected and intuitive wealth management technology platform.

Oppenheimer recently completed the buildout of the Investor Gateway, which it said enables clients to “seamlessly open new accounts, and includes a data-gathering process that navigates and enhances the delivery of our service capabilities and improves the overall client experience.”

The platform uses behavioral science for client journey mapping, in addition to improving digital engagement and the advisor-client relationship, the firm said.

The implementation of the enhanced new platform was achieved in strategic partnership with fintech firm InvestCloud, which built the cloud-based platform exclusively for Oppenheimer’s Private Client Division.

The digital portal, first implemented in 2020, integrates with Oppenheimer’s existing technology infrastructure and is now ready for use to onboard new accounts, it said.

The technology-enabled solutions being offered to Oppenheimer advisors and other professionals with the Investor Gateway include: a prospect portal with Oppenheimer content and product-related information; client onboarding and retention processes; and a bi-directional document vault allowing advisors and clients to share and store client information, proposals and agreements.

The ”design-led” delivery and fast integration of new solutions to existing Oppenheimer systems will occur on AdvisorWorks, an adaptive, proprietary customer relationship management and desktop dashboard that Oppenheimer said serves as the landing site for all advisor applications.

Advisor360° Teams With State Street, Charles River

State Street, Charles River Development and Advisor360° announced a strategic partnership on Wednesday to offer their wealth management platforms to help boost productivity, streamline operations and manage costs for enterprise wealth management companies.

As part of the deal, mutual clients of Charles River and Advisor360° will get access to cloud-based technology solutions that scale to support the different, varied user personas of wealth management firms, the companies said.

“The ability for mutual clients to leverage the capabilities of both firms helps create an innovative and differentiated wealth management solution for the industry,” they added.

Advisor360’s wealth management software includes an advisor portal with digital onboarding and insurance, client portal with digital engagement tools, and an enterprise workflow system with a “Unified Data Fabric” that was designed to “deeply integrate complex wealth data into a single household view across its platform,” according to the company.

Charles River’s end-to-end managed accounts platform includes: separately managed account/unified managed account capabilities; a manager-sponsor communication platform; institutional-grade compliance and trading; and portfolio customization, with the ability to add outsourced middle-office services via State Street, the firms said.

Advyzon Launches TAMP

Advyzon launched a new turnkey asset management program: Advyzon Investment Management, with Brian Huckstep, ex-Morningstar, serving as AIM chief investment officer.

AIM is the “natural evolution of Advyzon’s offering based on sentiment gathered via a survey of Advyzon’s advisor client base, as well as listening to their expressed needs over the past several years in ongoing consultative conversations,” the company said Tuesday.

The new solution will enable advisors to be more efficient through a better integrated user experience by providing new TAMP services conveniently within Advyzon’s single source code platform, it said.

“TAMP services allow advisors to outsource, without losing oversight and control, a variety of functions that are core to their business, such as investment selection, portfolio/model allocations, reporting, rebalancing, and back/mid office services, which can free up a significant amount of time and resources,” Advyzon explained.

Advisors can use that “freed up capacity to help scale their business, focusing on new client acquisition initiatives, spending more quality time on current client relationships, and focusing on financial planning aspects,” the company added.

Initially, AIM will provide risk-based models including active/passive mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, a tax-sensitive ETF-only solution, an environmental, social and governance active/passive model, an alternative model, and direct indexing, the company said.

Also offered will be tools and methodologies around tax optimization and tax loss harvesting. AIM intends to “continue to build out additional investment products around all of these core offerings, as well as offer new strategies, in the months to come,” the company said.