Orion Advisor Solutions unveiled new tools during its annual Ascent conference this week, as the firm continues its ambition to merge a group of acquired businesses into a unified pool of assets.
The firm has expanded its behavioral finance tools with the launch of PulseCheck, which aims to bring the client's “well-being and personal fulfillment” into the planning process.
“It's an integration of personal and financial well-being, and you don't want to sacrifice one for the other,” said Orion Chief Behavior Officer Dr. Daniel Crosby. “We want people to be careful and have some data about their lives as they try to build wealth. We also want people to build a life they can be proud of.”
Crosby said the tool asks clients to rank six qualities of “human flourishing” in order of importance. Based on concepts known from psychology, the goal is to discover which motivators are essential for individuals. This could be the pursuit of happiness, having a sense of commitment, believing that one is making “progress” toward a goal, or prioritizing healthy relationships, among others.
By ranking clients, counselors can determine how a client is doing in relation to their “ideal life” and discover where there may be gaps. He said PulseCheck provides advisors with talking points on how clients can align more closely with their values.
Wealthtech's Orion 2024 survey found that one-third of advisors have already integrated behavioral finance into their practice, while 43% plan to do so within three years.
Behavioral finance concepts are also incorporated into Orion Compare, a proposal generation program. The tool integrates data from all Orion platforms, including portfolio accounting, risk detection, trading and CRM. It includes a 20-question assessment for customers to give a picture of how much they worry about money and how they talk about it. The proposal generation tool takes the information and produces a narrative for advisors to use with the client when making proposals about their financial plans.
The tool also includes “sliders” in the portal so advisers can make adjustments to a client's portfolio instantly and execute those changes with a click through Eclipse, its trading and rebalancing software, said Brian McLaughlin, former -CEO of Redtail and now president. of Orion Advisor Technology.
“What advisers had to do before was a multi-step function,” he said. “They had to switch between different apps, different settings pages, and then run the results again. It's constantly doing it for them, saving them a huge amount of time, but it's also a bit more fun.”
The new enhancements bring Orion closer to integrating all of its disparate technologies, acquired over the past several years, into a unified asset stack – an important theme at the conference. The firm's survey of advisors found that integration was still a significant pain point for many.
Orion's vision, executives explained, is to put the technology together with CRM at the center, but with the same look and feel across all applications, which would be a departure from how most advisors currently experience the various platforms. of Orion.
“We're eliminating this by unifying the product language so they look and feel similar enough to reduce friction for advisors and their staff to use the tools properly,” McLaughlin said.
“People have high hopes for us to unify these products and bring them into an easy-to-understand, easy-to-train and process-educated solution for them that can deliver them, if they want, any of these solutions, or what I am. What we're really happy and proud about is that it's an all-in-one, which means they can have an alternative solution to what we offer and still have the same workflow experience.”