Wealthtech company Orion Advisor Solutions has expanded its partnership with DPL Financial Partners, an insurance management platform for registered investment advisers, to offer direct access to DPL's commission-free pension market, Product Discovery Tools and team its licensed insurance consultants.
New to the integration is a single sign-on and full direct access for fee-based advisors using the Orion Advisor technology platform.
Advisors on the Orion platform with a DPL membership can compare annuities by type, benefits and costs using DPL's proprietary tools, bringing data feeds directly into the Orion platform.
When the two firms first integrated in November 2021, advisers had access to a limited supply of Orion data.
Advisors can also more easily manage annuity assets alongside other investments in clients' portfolios.
In addition to choosing commission-free annuities, advisors can find life, disability and long-term care products on the market for their clients.
DPL founder and CEO David Lau said the time and technology were right to look at fee-based annuities arise among fiduciary RIAs. But he said he had no interest in selling to any of the big insurance carriers.
“I want to own the distribution of the fee-based pension,” he said.
“If you think about the consulting world, everything is fee-based. They didn't just decide to switch from commissions to fees,” he said, rattling off a list of the many large financial services companies that initiated the change.
DPL's digital product catalog can currently model over 3,200 annuities and over 100,000 riders.
As well as helping an adviser best match an annuity to a client's current situation, the platform's comparison engine can also help advisers working with existing annuity holders.
“The platform is problem-focused, not product-focused,” he said, meaning that if a customer's current product doesn't meet their expectations or needs, it can be compared to others in the market based on many different parameters. .
According to the firm, more than 5,500 RIA firms have access to DPL either through direct membership or through partnerships with wealth management platforms.
And Orion is not the first such platform to partner with DPL.
Wealth management platform provider Black Diamond, owned by SS&C Technologies, launched its own insurance market for RIAs in partnership with DPL in autumn 2021.
That effort was heavily integrated with the Black Diamond Wealth Platform and allowed for similar searches and comparisons; 100 RIA firms piloted it during the development phase, which began a year ago.
In terms of cost, firms pay DPL a membership fee that varies depending on AUM, with discounts for multi-year memberships. Fees start at $1,000 a year, and are per firm, not per location, a DPL spokesman said. It enables all advisers to access DPL's product marketplace, tools, digital applications and contract management platform, as well as the company's team of licensed insurance consultants.