Addepar, a technology provider for RIAs and wealth managers, has announced the launch of its trading platform, the rollout of dashboard enhancements and other enhancements to its products.
The new Addepar Trading platform enables full trade execution and rebalancing of clients' portfolios and includes model building features. Additionally, the platform is scalable and can trade and rebalance across families or bulk accounts across a firm. It also supports advanced model building, interactive worksheets and pre-trade compliance checks. Firms can trade using flat file execution or use options that include automated FIX trading and post-trade processing.
In the end 2021 Addepar acquired trading and rebalancing startup AdvisorPeakand while some might assume the new platform is built using technology from that product, they'd be wrong, according to chief product officer Don Nilsson.
“Addepar Trading is completely built from scratch and is completely native to the Addepar platform,” Nilsson said of the technology. “We had already started building our trading solution prior to the AdvisorPeak acquisition, and it was primarily a rental — from the day that team arrived, we were already working on a new one.”
Asked why Addepar had built its own trading platform when so many existing products are available to advisers, Phil Senseny, head of trading for Addepar, explained that larger firms were looking to the company to help them consolidate groups their technology.
“That best and then integration strategy is now going in the opposite direction to reduce the cost of integration and vendor risk is real, it's costly and it takes time,” Senseny said, referring to the risks. consulting firms face cybersecurity oversight and vulnerabilities when working with multiple third-party technology vendors.
He said it was also about the ability to build and optimize workflows to help Addepar's client firms become more efficient.
“We've put together the information you need so that when you log in in the morning, you can see what you need to do and then just work through the workflow,” Senseny said.
Addepar works with 1,000 client firms managing almost $6.5 trillion in assets in 45 countries and has an annual research and development budget of $100 million. Senseny said many of its users had requested these features to help optimize their trading operations while still allowing for flexibility.
“We have advisors building centralized trading organizations within the firm where they can build their best thinking through models, building model allocations and putting them on the shelf,” he said.
Firms can then enter and update, for example, a capital market assumption, as well as many other customizations, from the ability to create equivalent rules, add tax budgets or add rounding rules.
Another part of the announcement is the introduction of Addepar's Dashboard, which Nilsson described as a highly customizable and visually appealing way to view strategies, tasks and portfolio data. Advisors or their firms can create and customize dashboards with drag-and-drop elements, customizable widgets, and scheduling updates. They can also choose between custom color palettes or light or dark viewing modes.
The dashboards are meant to seamlessly integrate with data from the entire Addepar ecosystem of analytics, data and account aggregation.
“This is a big effort to elevate the aesthetics of the platform,” Nilsson said.
He added that it was also intended as a way to showcase the platform's underlying data and allow client firms to aggregate that data into dashboards and widgets of their choice and customize them as they wish. to see them.
Addepar Dashboards
“When you're in core Addepar, you have charts and graphs there, so anything you can achieve in the core analysis part you can achieve in a dashboard, but in that core, you can't put charts next to each other, for example. , with the dashboard you can put them wherever you want,” he said.
Asked what was in the future roadmap for panels, his answer was simple.
“Wherever there's depth to the user interface, we'll likely offer dashboards,” he said, adding that the company already has a long roadmap for the future and that dashboards had been in beta for quite some time and that the company was doing the job. generally available with notice.
“Compatibility, for example, is a common need that all customers have, so we will build that ourselves,” he said.
While the dashboard and widget features will be available to Addepar customers at no additional charge, the trading platform is an add-on service to the core Addepar platform.
Addepar does not publish price information and does not provide it to the media.
“From a merchandising perspective, we've done a lot of market research and we think we've found a starting price that's in line with our competition,” Senseny said.