As an independent financial advisor, you face unique challenges compared to advisors who work at large firms. You must manage every aspect of your practice, from compliance to client relationships, all while providing sophisticated investment solutions and financial guidance.
If you want to streamline your workload while ensuring outstanding service, a Turnkey Asset Management Platform (TAMP) is a must-have solution. These powerful platforms give you access to institutional-grade investment strategies, simplify your administration, and enhance your client service.
With so many TAMPs on the market today, choosing the right one requires careful consideration. So, how can you find a TAMP that aligns with your business needs? Below, we’ll briefly define TAMPs and how they work. After that, we’ll outline fourteen key features to look for in a TAMP as an independent financial advisor.
What is a Turnkey Asset Management Platform?
A TAMP is a software solution that allows financial advisors to outsource their investment management. Some TAMPs allow automation to do the heavy lifting, while others incorporate third-party teams of investment experts. In either case, a TAMP can take the following tasks off your hands:
- Portfolio construction – Rather than manually building each client’s portfolio, a TAMP allows you to leverage pre-built portfolios designed by professional asset managers.
- Portfolio management – TAMPs continuously monitor, adjust, and rebalance your clients’ portfolios based on changing market conditions, freeing up valuable time for you to focus on higher-priority tasks.
- Elevated investment strategies – Some TAMPs provide access to institutional-grade investment strategies, such as mutual funds, ETFs, or separately managed accounts (SMAs), that you may not have the resources or expertise to manage on your own.
While all TAMPs offer asset management support, full-service TAMPs, like Alden COVE from Alden Investment Group, also assist with back-office and administrative tasks, such as regulatory reporting, compliance monitoring, and client communications.
By choosing a TAMP with these comprehensive features, you can free up more time to focus on client relationships, financial planning, and business development. For this reason, an increasing number of financial advisors have been turning to TAMPs in recent years.
Read More: What is a TAMP and Should You Use One?
14 Essential TAMP Features for Independent Financial Advisors
Now that we’ve explained what TAMPs are, you may be wondering which functions are critical to your success. Here are 14 features that can help streamline your operations, enhance client satisfaction, and take your advisory practice to the next level:
#1 Pre-Built & Custom Model Portfolios
When evaluating potential TAMPs, one of the most important features to look for is access to a wide range of pre-built and custom model portfolios.
- Pre-built portfolios are designed by experienced asset managers. These ready-made portfolios allow you to quickly match clients with well-structured, institutional-grade strategies. They’re ideal for clients who have relatively straightforward investment needs.
- Custom model portfolios provide more flexibility and control than their pre-built counterparts. You can tailor these portfolios to meet your clients’ unique financial goals, risk tolerance, and time horizons. This personalized approach ensures that clients with complex requirements receive the most suitable investment strategies.
By choosing a TAMP with both pre-built and custom models, you can deliver a diverse range of solutions and serve clients with varying needs, from those seeking simplicity to those requiring more specialized strategies.
Alden COVE allows you to take either approach, thanks to its pre-built model portfolios, advanced portfolio construction tools, and expert support from Alden Investment Group’s investment committee.
Read More: 10 Benefits of Leveraging the Expertise of an Investment Committee
#2 Performance Analysis Tools
After crafting a client’s portfolio, you must carefully track its performance. A TAMP with robust performance analysis tools can simplify this process and give you deeper insights into your clients’ investments.
For example, Alden COVE’s Portfolio Analyzer offers advanced analytics that compares your clients’ current holdings against various benchmarks and alternative strategies. By leveraging this tool, you can quickly spot discrepancies between your clients’ portfolios and their financial goals and make informed adjustments.
#3 Risk Management Assessments
From shifts in interest rates to geopolitical events, many factors may expose your clients’ portfolios to risk. A TAMP with advanced risk management tools helps you identify, monitor, and mitigate these risks before they jeopardize your clients’ financial goals.
Some helpful risk management tools to look for in a TAMP include:
- Risk tolerance assessments – These assessments can help you determine a client’s comfort level with risk, ensuring that their portfolio aligns with their capacity to handle market fluctuations.
- Stress testing – Stress tests simulate how a portfolio may perform under extreme market conditions, such as an economic downturn or sharp market correction, so you can uncover potential vulnerabilities in advance.
- Scenario analysis tools – These tools analyze how different hypothetical situations, such as interest rate hikes or economic recessions, may impact clients’ portfolios.
Alden COVE includes all three of these features, enabling you to fortify your risk management with ease.
Read More: Why It’s Time to Overcome Your TAMP Hesitations as a Financial Advisor
#4 Portfolio Rebalancing
As market conditions evolve, your clients’ portfolios may drift away from their target asset allocation, exposing them to unnecessary risk. Fortunately, some TAMPs come with automatic portfolio rebalancing capabilities.
Automated rebalancing helps maintain your clients’ portfolios within their target asset allocation by automatically buying and selling holdings as needed. Some TAMPs even let you customize your rebalancing rules by setting specific thresholds. For example, you could program your system to trigger a rebalance if any asset class deviates more than 5% from its target.
By taking this tedious process off your hands, a TAMP like Alden COVE can save you time and reduce the risk of human error, ensuring well-diversified portfolios without constant manual oversight. This boosts your efficiency while giving clients peace of mind.
#5 Custodial Integrations
If you work with multiple custodians, such as Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and others, it’s helpful to choose a TAMP that has custodial integrations. These convenient integrations eliminate the need to log into separate systems and create a more streamlined experience for you and your clients.
Custodial integrations also streamline money movement between accounts. You can effortlessly transfer funds, execute trades, and monitor asset allocations in real time, all from a single platform. By reducing the need for manual data entry, these integrations help ensure that transactions are completed quickly, accurately, and with minimal friction.
#6 Unified Managed Accounts (UMAs)
A TAMP with integrated UMAs simplifies investment management by consolidating different asset classes into a single account. This reduces the complexity of managing separate accounts for each asset class.
UMAs can also enhance cash management by automating the distribution of cash reserves to the appropriate asset classes based on clients’ financial plans and market conditions.
Read More: Five Ways TAMPs Help RIAs with Administration
#7 Held-Away Account Management
Some of your clients may come to you with 401(k)s, IRAs, or brokerage accounts held with other custodians, which can be challenging to manage without the right tools. Luckily, a TAMP with held-away account capabilities can simplify the process.
For instance, Alden COVE lets you track and manage held-away accounts, ensuring they align with your clients’ overall financial goals and enabling you to provide more comprehensive recommendations.
#8 Account Opening and Servicing Support
While TAMPs can enhance your asset management in several ways, you must onboard clients and open their accounts before you can manage their investments. Full-service TAMPs simplify this process, thanks to their account opening and servicing support.
Alden COVE, for example, integrates seamlessly with Redtail CRM, eliminating the need for manual data entry and simplifying the client onboarding process. Additionally, its DocuSign integration facilitates fast signature collections, reducing the need for in-person meetings and minimizing delays.
Alden COVE’s support goes beyond just opening accounts – it also provides automated client updates, simplifies tax reporting, and ensures ongoing compliance monitoring. This robust infrastructure helps alleviate your administrative burdens, giving you more time to focus on client relationships and business development initiatives.
Read More: The Role of the Modern Financial Advisor: How Technology is Shaping Their Success
#9 Document Management
As an independent financial advisor, efficient document management is essential to your organization and regulatory compliance. By selecting a TAMP with an integrated document management system, you can securely store client documents in one centralized location.
From service agreements to investment reports, having everything stored in the cloud also ensures you’re always prepared for meetings and regulatory audits.
#10 Comprehensive Reporting
Timely reporting is crucial to your client relationships and compliance. A comprehensive TAMP can generate detailed reports that cover key aspects of your clients’ portfolios, from their current holdings and performance to their trades and taxes.
By automatically creating these reports, your TAMP can help you provide your clients with accurate, up-to-date information. Alden COVE also allows you to customize your reports to clients’ unique needs, making your communications that much more personalized and impactful.
#11 Client Portal
Just as you want easy access to important documents, so do your clients. That’s where a built-in client portal comes into play. Here are a few benefits this convenient feature can provide to you and your clients:
- 24/7 access – A secure web portal allows your clients to review their account information, performance reports, and transaction history from anywhere, at any time.
- Time savings – With instant access to financial statements and performance reports, clients are less likely to reach out to request documents, freeing up your time for more complex inquiries.
- Secure communication – A TAMP web portal can serve as a secure communication channel, allowing clients to send messages, ask questions, and receive your answers, all while ensuring their sensitive data remains protected.
- Custom branding – Alden COVE’s portal stands out for its custom branding, which allows you to personalize its interface to reflect your firm’s logo and color scheme. This customization can reinforce your brand identity and provide a consistent, professional experience for clients every time they log in.
#12 Client Communication Tools
According to a 2024 study, the frequency of your communication directly impacts how confident and comfortable clients feel about their financial plans. Thus, ensuring regular communication is essential to your client retention.
A TAMP with built-in communication tools makes it easy to stay connected with clients and keep them informed. Alden COVE, for example, lets you automate the distribution of performance reports, saving you time while still ensuring clients receive regular updates.
Alden COVE also offers customizable email templates, which you can personalize and incorporate into automated campaigns. This enables you to effortlessly send monthly newsletters, meeting reminders, and other important updates in a few clicks.
#13 Modern Interface
A feature-rich TAMP won’t be worthwhile if it’s difficult to use. That’s why it’s essential to choose a platform that offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface and performs seamlessly across all devices.
Alden COVE renders flawlessly on PCs, Macs, tablets, and smartphones, allowing you to manage your clients’ portfolios from the office, at home, or on the go. This platform’s responsive design also adapts to any screen size, so you never have to worry about readability issues. Better yet, Alden COVE’s modern interface boasts a clean layout, easy navigation, and intuitive features.
Thanks to its thoughtful user experience, Alden COVE allows you to spend less time learning how to use the platform and more time serving your clients.
#14 Ongoing Training & Support
After selecting a TAMP with powerful features, you want to make sure you use it to its full potential. In turn, you should look for a TAMP that offers ongoing training and support.
With Alden COVE, you’ll receive comprehensive training and personalized business consulting from Alden Investment Group’s experienced team. Their expert guidance can help you maximize your TAMP utilization, enhance your operational efficiency, and improve your client service.
Beyond this technical support and training, Alden’s team can also assist in scaling your practice by providing client referrals, helping you craft a strategic succession plan, and maximizing the value of your book of business.
Read More: Measuring Your Book of Business as a Financial Advisor
Unlock Full-Service TAMP Capabilities with Alden COVE
By selecting a TAMP with these fourteen features, you can set yourself up to thrive as an independent financial advisor. Luckily, you don’t need to look too far – Alden COVE has all fourteen features you need to optimize your practice, along with many others.
Thanks to these features, Alden COVE can help you serve more clients, boost your efficiency, and enhance your business growth. By joining Alden Investment Group, you can also enjoy exclusive access to a wide range of resources and expertise.
Ready to elevate your business with a full-service TAMP? Contact Alden Investment Group today to learn more about how Alden COVE and our RIA can help you reach your goals.
Sources:
Plan Advisor. Advisers Increasingly Turn to Third-Party Asset Managers.
https://www.planadviser.com/advisers-increasingly-turn-third-party-asset-managers/
YCharts. Why Frequent Advisor Communication Matters: Insights from YCharts’ Latest Survey.
https://get.ycharts.com/resources/blog/why-frequent-advisor-communication-matters-insights-from-ycharts-latest-survey/