Fixed income intelligence and portfolio management startup YieldX is now officially integrated into the Schwab Advisor Center, according to an announcement. The firm’s availability as a third-party integration with Schwab comes after the firm entered the wealth management marketplace in 2020, subsequently closed its Series A investment round a year later, led by Envestnet, and recently added eMoney advisor Edmond Walters to its board of advisors.
YieldX is designed to bring automation and transparency to the clunky world of fixed income. The firm debuted with an analytics tool to screen and identify fixed incomes assets, another tool for building customized fixed income portfolios and an algorithm-based feature for balancing income or yield target goals against risk and expense ratios.
It has since added a tool for building bond ladders and another algorithm for identifying optimization opportunities within existing fixed income portfolios to improve the portfolio's overall yield or reduce its exposure to volatility.
YieldX has proved valuable for clients with corporate cash and cash on hand, said Blake Fellows, president of Fellows Financial Group, a $200 million AUM firm based in Leesburg, Va., and associated with Wealthcare Advisory Partners.
Instead of relying on the firm’s own research and legwork to build short-term, state-specific muni bond ladders, advisors can use YieldX to not only do the research but also present the information to clients in a more user-friendly interface, he said. The tool “accomplishes most of what we were doing before, all in one place, all in one platform.”
“It was easy to use and easy to understand,” he explained. YieldX “provides more certainty in relation to having access to your capital, but also gaining a rate of return to at least compete with inflation, if not try and beat it. Right now, that’s a very big topic.”
When the tool was debuted, one advisor estimated that firms using the tool would need to have a robust fixed income business, with $5 to $10 million in new assets to justify the cost of YieldX, which costs $10,000 a seat, per year, for an enterprise license.
Fellows said the cost is justified for his firm, because the value-add provided by helping clients with their corporate cash leads to greater wallet share and new revenue-generating opportunities in areas like insurance. “It’s more than just a fee generator,” he said of YieldX.
While YieldX’s integration with Schwab isn’t going to make or break his use of the tool, it does make the tool more convenient, Fellows added.