I joined Ensemble in 2008 when it was a founding model. In 2014, a small group of employees bought out the founder. It was that transition that allowed us to start focusing on our technology group. With the founder model, they are used to doing things their way. We were paper based until then. We realized that to reach the next stage of growth, we needed to focus on our technology group. I was promoted to COO in 2016. My goal then was to expand our technology group and launch some new software solutions.
CRM, Reporting, Rebalancing and Trading: Envestnet | Tamarac
In hindsight, one of the things that has allowed us to be successful in rolling out different technologies is that we're not afraid to intervene. We're not afraid to step in and get our hands dirty. We're not afraid to try a new software package and potentially see it fail. We have managed to have a process to make change.
Out of the box, CRM won't do much. Previously, we used PortfolioCenter and did all our internal reconciliations. We had dabbled with Salesforce, but mostly used it as a Rolodex. It's good for that, but most modern CRMs, they're capable of much more. It's just a matter of how much work you want to put into it. You can quickly set up a Rolodex. But if you don't focus on putting in the time to improve the platform to make it your own, you won't get much out of it.
Most advisors at Envestnet | The Tamarac suite uses it for rebalancing individual funds. We are using their rebalancing platform but in a customized way. We have had an excellent relationship with Envestnet | Tamarac over the years. They have been able to customize our instance for us on certain occasions when we needed it.
There was a time a few years ago when Envestnet | Tamarac service was not as good as it is today. Over the last year and a half, we have been happy with them on the CRM side. If you're with Salesforce or some of the other CRMs out there, you may need to hire a consultant or a separate third party to build your workflows. On the CRM side, one of the sites Envestnet | Tamarac has been strong, at least for us, if we are able to imagine what we want. It can be a 10 or 15 page document with all the different tasks. Once we've done this together, they've worked well with us to help build them. We do some of it in-house. For cases where it's too complex, they'll either help us build it or they'll be able to do a special service agreement to create something specific for us. They have been good partners for us.
When choosing a technology provider, one of the things I like to look at is the frequency of updates. Investnet | Tamarac has a long history of updating its platform over time. If I'm evaluating someone, I might ask them to show me the last 18 months of product improvements. Anyone should be able to share it with you. What are those product improvements? Would they be meaningful to me if I were on the platform? Investnet | Tamarac has done a good job of deploying significant product improvements to CRM, reporting and rebalancing.
Another reason why I'm glad we're at Envestnet | The Tamarac kit is because the integrations are great. We use Schwab as our primary custodian and their integration is good. They're trying to make it even better, but it's good.
Model Portfolio: Equity Data Science
We use Equity Data Science to build our portfolio stock model. Our sales team is working on it and they have been happy with it. They're about 18 months into deployment, and it's given them a ton more visibility into position sizing and technical details on the trading side, including the implications of the changes we've made to the splits between stocks.
File sharing and document management: Egnyte
We also digitized our filing cabinet. We're using Egnyte for cloud-based file sharing and document management, which has worked well for us. We use it just like a file share, but it's very organized, with internal rules about how we title things and where we put things. There are stronger platforms out there. As we continue to grow, we may see something stronger. But from a cybersecurity perspective, Egnyte is dialed in and user-friendly. It's been great for us.
Egnyte does not need to integrate much. We have worked out some of our integrations because you can save the locations on the file sharing server. If we need to refer to a location within CRM, we will point it back to Egnyte. There is a hyperlink that you can click to return to the client file if you need to.
Communications: Zoom in
Zoom has been successful for us as well. We have a vibrant social community within Zoom. We are long distance first so we all don't get to see each other much in the office.
Digital Marketing: Hubspot
I know our team has appreciated having Hubspot for digital marketing. It's robust and can do a lot to give us visibility into who's signed up to receive certain things on our website and who's watched some of our webinars and allows us to contact them.
Cyber Security: Confidential
I don't like to name all the cybersecurity vendors we use because it gives bad actors more ammunition to create sophisticated phishing attempts.
We do periodic phishing testing. Out of the box, many of the platforms that offer phishing testing will be quarterly or annual. We have called them all up to their highest levels. We are testing phishing once a week. If you click on a phishing email, you sign up for refresher training. There is also a monthly cyber security awareness training that we are doing.
As told by reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what's in your possession? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).