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Independent registered investment advisors (RIAs) have a lot of work on their plates, from attracting new clients to overseeing administrative tasks. Onboarding clients, rebalancing portfolios, and generating reports are just a few critical items on that list.

If you’re an RIA, trying to manage it all alone can be overwhelming. Splitting your focus in so many directions may also lead you to spend less time on what matters most: building strong relationships with clients and delivering personalized financial advice.

The good news? A robust Turnkey Asset Management Platform (TAMP), like Alden COVE, can alleviate many of your administrative burdens.

In this article, we’ll briefly define TAMPs, outline their key features, and introduce Alden COVE. After that, we’ll explore five ways TAMPs can help you streamline your administration and allocate more time to your client relationships.

What is a TAMP?

A TAMP is a comprehensive, outsourced solution that provides all of the tools and resources you need to manage client portfolios, meet regulatory requirements, and streamline your back-office operations.

TAMPs have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. However, not all TAMPs offer the same features. Some have limited functionalities, while Alden COVE is a more comprehensive, full-service solution. Here are a few of this TAMPs’ key features:

Portfolio management – One of the primary functions of a TAMP is to streamline your portfolio management. Alden COVE connects you to a wide range of model portfolios and custom investment strategies designed by industry experts, along with convenient rebalancing tools.
Trade execution and portfolio rebalancing – Ensuring optimal asset allocation isn’t a one-and-done process – you must regularly rebalance your clients’ portfolios to ensure they align with their risk tolerance and goals. Many TAMPs can automate rebalancing, executing trades on your behalf while generating a detailed audit trail.
Risk management and analytics – Using advanced risk profiling tools, TAMPs can evaluate your clients’ portfolios and tailor investments to suit their unique risk tolerance. Alden COVE also provides detailed performance analytics so you can evaluate your clients’ returns at a glance.
Compliance and regulatory support – By documenting every trade and generating automatic reports, TAMPs can assist with your regulatory filings, compliance reviews, and ongoing audits, allowing you to satisfy your fiduciary standards and regulatory requirements with ease.
Client reporting and communications – TAMPs automatically generate client statements, performance reports, and tax documents and deliver them to your clients at the ideal times. Alden COVE’s custom-branded client web portal also gives your clients real-time access to their portfolio information.
Account opening and administration – As a full-service solution, Alden COVE lets you outsource account openings, speeds up onboarding by auto-populating client forms with CRM data, and integrates with e-signature solutions. Additionally, its custodian integrations simplify fund transfers and distributions, while its billing services and automatic invoicing ensure prompt payments.
Business development support – Depending on the TAMP you choose, you can also gain access to additional support services offered by your TAMP provider. For instance, Alden COVE users enjoy access to Alden Investment Group’s resources, including marketing, lead generation, and succession planning support.

5 Administrative Benefits of Leveraging a TAMP as an RIA

Now that you understand what TAMPs are and how they work, let’s take a look at five specific ways TAMPs can reduce your administrative workload.

#1 TAMPs Streamline Account Opening and Client Onboarding

Whether it’s through marketing, advertising, or referrals, you work hard to acquire your clients. However, the work doesn’t stop there – after securing a new client, you must onboard them and create their account. This process involves several time-consuming administrative tasks, including:

Gathering the clients’ information
Making sure they fill out all of the forms correctly
Collecting their signatures
Managing their custodial and compliance paperwork
Determining their investment preferences and risk tolerance

Not only can these tasks be tedious, but they’re also error-prone when done manually – just one typing error could lead to compliance issues or onboarding delays. Fortunately, a TAMP can simplify the account opening process and streamline the paperwork involved. Here’s how:

TAMPs digitize client onboarding – With Alden COVE’s customer relationship management (CRM) integration, it can automatically upload new clients’ information into the necessary forms, minimizing the need for manual data entry.
TAMPs reduce paperwork – TAMPs can electronically process client documents and store them securely for future reference, eliminating paper forms’ inefficiencies and speeding up your onboarding timeline.
Some TAMPs feature seamless custodian integrations – Alden COVE supports and integrates with multiple custodians, including Schwab, Fidelity, and Raymond James. Better yet, its client services team can submit custodial paperwork, track funding, and manage distributions on your behalf.

By streamlining client onboarding, a TAMP can reduce your administrative overhead and ensure accuracy, enabling you to start off your relationships with new clients on the right foot.

#2 TAMPs Simplify Client Communication and Reporting

After securing a new client, you must deliver exceptional service to retain them long-term. Countless studies show that the key to client retention is consistent communication. Just take a look at these statistics:

Only 22% of clients who hear from their financial advisors every four to six months are comfortable with their financial plans.
In contrast, 71% of clients who receive monthly contact from their financial advisors report high levels of satisfaction with their financial plans.
98% of clients with over $500,000 under advisory want their advisor to provide regular updates about the investment market and economy.

While client communication is essential, 28% of advisors struggle to find the time to connect with their clients. These time-strapped advisors spend 41% more time each month on administrative tasks than those who prioritize regular client communication.

If your client communication could use some improvement, leveraging a TAMP can make all the difference. Here’s how Alden COVE can enhance your client communication and reporting:

Alden COVE features a customizable client dashboard – Today’s financial clients expect 24/7 access to their investment portfolios. With Alden COVE’s Adepar integration, your clients gain real-time access to their investment accounts through a secure web portal. You can customize this portal’s dashboards to reflect your branding.
Alden COVE automates client reporting – Client reporting is crucial for maintaining regulatory compliance. Alden COVE automatically generates comprehensive client reports that detail portfolio performance, asset allocation, and risk assessments. It also allows you to schedule and distribute these reports to clients at your preferred intervals, ensuring transparency and consistency in your communication.
Alden COVE includes convenient communication tools – Sharing reports, performance summaries, and market updates is easy with Alden COVE. You can deliver these insights to your clients via email or directly through the secure web portal.

#3 TAMPs Automate Portfolio Rebalancing and Asset Management

Managing client portfolios is a complex task, and ensuring they remain aligned with each client’s unique investment objectives only adds to the challenge. Without an asset management platform, you must manually monitor your clients’ asset allocations, rebalance their portfolios, and ensure tax efficiency on your own.

These tasks used to make up the core responsibilities of financial advisors. However, the financial advising landscape has changed dramatically over the past two decades. We explore this shift in our article, “The Role of the Modern Fin ancial Advisor: How Technology is Shaping Their Success.” As this article explains, you must go above and beyond asset management if you want to stay competitive in today’s market.

Here’s how Alden COVE can assist with this process:

Alden COVE provides comprehensive investment solutions – Alden COVE gives you access to over 500 institutional-grade asset management strategies, including equities, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and separately managed accounts (SMAs). Whether you prefer to design customized portfolios based on your clients’ unique goals or utilize pre-built models, you can efficiently manage both within a single, integrated platform.
Alden COVE has an advanced trade order management system (TOMS) – Alden COVE’s TOMS streamlines trading and rebalancing across multiple custodians, boosting your efficiency, minimizing errors, and simplifying separate account and Unified Managed Account (UMA) management.
Alden COVE allows you to customize your rebalancing parameters – Alden COVE allows you to create tailored rebalancing rules to meet each client’s unique needs, whether that involves adjusting their asset allocations, preserving specific tax lots, or deferring rebalancing for certain assets. This flexibility ensures you can manage client portfolios with maximum tax efficiency.

Along with providing these time-saving features, Alden COVE also gives you access to Alden Investment Group’s investment committee. This experienced team can help you elevate your investment strategies, incorporate alternative investments, and ensure your clients receive optimized returns.

#4 TAMPs Fortify Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management

As an RIA, you have more complex compliance requirements than the average financial advisor. You must file your annual Form ADVs, deliver quarterly statements to clients with independent verification, disclose potential conflicts of interest, and comply with strict advertising regulations.

As these requirements evolve, maintaining compliance can take up a lot of your time and resources. Without proper support, these tasks may divert focus and effort away from serving your clients and growing your business.

Alden COVE can alleviate these compliance burdens, thanks to its following features:

Client and compliance reporting – As we mentioned earlier, Alden COVE generates detailed reports about your client portfolios, proving that you’ve properly aligned your strategy with their stated risk tolerance and investment objectives.
Digital risk profiling – Next, Alden COVE features an advanced risk profiling tool, which allows you to quickly assess your clients’ risk tolerance and investment preferences. It maintains a secure archive of these risk assessments, providing a comprehensive audit trail for your regulatory record-keeping.
Ongoing monitoring and alerts – Alden COVE constantly monitors your client portfolios for potential compliance issues, including those related to asset allocations, risk levels, and regulatory changes. It provides real-time alerts for these concerns, allowing you to take corrective actions before they develop into more significant problems.

With the help of these compliance and risk management features, you can stay on top of your regulatory responsibilities with ease while reducing your administrative workload.

#5 TAMPs Outsource Back-Office Operations and Provide Ongoing Support

From document management to IT troubleshooting, back-office operations play a crucial role in your firm’s success. While these tasks may not involve direct client interaction, they ensure that your financial transactions, systems, and workflows run seamlessly.

Managing these tasks with minimal support can be challenging. By outsourcing some of these back-office functions, you can free up your time to focus on serving your clients and growing your business.

Here are some of the back-office support features provided by Alden COVE:

Client support team – Alden COVE’s support team can take over many back-office tasks, from account opening to client distributions. With this team working tirelessly behind the scenes, you can spend more time on other tasks, knowing your administrative work is in good hands.
Implementation support – Many financial advisors avoid adopting TAMP technology due to concerns about the implementation process and subsequent learning curve. Fortunately, you don’t need to worry about these issues with Alden COVE. Integrating this easy-to-use platform is a breeze. Our team will support you through the implementation process, provide ongoing training, and ensure a seamless transition.
24/7 tech support – TAMPs consolidate multiple solutions into one platform, including portfolio management software, financial planning software, risk profiling tools, billing software, document management systems, e-signatures, and so much more. If you were to purchase these tools separately, you’d have to deal with multiple IT vendors, each with its own support system, service protocols, and response times. By centralizing these functions, TAMPs can streamline your tech support. For example, Alden COVE gives you a single point of contact for all of your tech support needs, ensuring faster resolutions and fewer operational disruptions.

By outsourcing these critical back-office functions, a TAMP like Alden COVE can help you scale your operations, reduce overhead costs, and enhance the advising experience for everyone on your team.

Streamline Your Administration With Alden COVE

In summary, TAMP technology can significantly enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and simplicity of your administrative processes. The key is choosing a TAMP that provides the right set of features for your financial advising practice.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive wealth management ecosystem with strong back-office support, Alden COVE is the ideal solution. Designed specifically for RIAs, this platform can optimize your operations, support your scalability, and enhance your client experience.

Here are just a few of its standout features: