CRM: AdvisorEngine CRM
We were old Junxure users and have stayed there [AdvisorEngine acquired Junxure in 2018 and dropped that name in 2022]. Like anything, now and then things here or there we wish it would do or simplify, but for the most part, we’re happy there. That is a day-to-day cornerstone.
Reporting/Portfolio Management: SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Platform
We’ve been with Black Diamond since 2008. They continue to make improvements. We are happy there. We do a lot with alternative investments, so we have nitpicky complaints. We wish they would handle alternatives better on issues like updated pricing. But for the most part, there have been no issues. I don’t see any changes happening there.
Rebalancing: Morningstar TRX
Even though we’re with Black Diamond, we’ve never made the move over to their rebalancer. We’re using Morningstar TRX. We’ve always been happy with that. Honestly, there’s a lack of desire to make a move because it would be a lot of work to redo that. But maybe at some point, we do move to Black Diamond’s rebalancer. Having everything on one system would be nice. That’s probably the Holy Grail of tech is getting everything to talk together. It talks decently now, but if we could get it more integrated, any integrations are better, rather than worse.
Financial Planning: eMoney Advisor
That’s another software that we’re in quite often. We’ve used eMoney for several years. We were with Cheshire Wealth Manager before that, and ExecPlan before that. It took us a while to get used to the cash flow planning with eMoney, but we’re happy.
Tax Planning, Investment Analytics, Risk Tolerance & Client Data Gathering: Holistiplan, Kwanti, PreciseFP
We do tax returns in-house and for a long time used Bloomberg BNA Tax Planner. It took us a while to get comfortable with Holistiplan—that was a big change—and [realizing] that it was going to give us what we needed and wanted. There are certainly times when Bloomberg BNA Tax Planner would have modeled something out better and we could have gotten more granular. But Holistipan does a good job. There is the tax letter piece of it that Holistiplan has, but I don’t know how many advisors are using it. That was one of the things that got us over the hump. It’s been useful at the end of the year with issues like Qualified Charitable Distributions or 529 Plan Contributions. Those [used to] get missed on a whole bunch of tax returns. [Previously,] we were doing that internally with an Excel document for a client every year. Being able to systematize that into Holistiplan has been a big help.
We just recently looked at YCharts again. We like what YCharts is doing, but it doesn’t have the ease of use that Kwanti has for us. For what we’re looking to do, Kwanti just does it easier and better.
Now we’re using PreciseFP’s simple questionnaire as a jumping-off point in Kwanti to run stress testing. In the past, we’ve used FinaMetrica, which we liked. We’ve also previously used Riskalyze, now Nitrogen, but we didn’t necessarily love them. I know they’ve got a big market share. We tended to appreciate FinaMetrica’s more academically based approach better. Nitrogen had a lot of bells and whistles that we didn’t necessarily use to our full advantage. We also didn’t love the actual risk tolerance aspect of Nitrogen. A lot of the advantages of Nitrogen are more on the proposal and marketing side. We use a lot of alternative investments. We couldn’t get comfortable with how they were showing up very low risk or very high risk when a lot of them were more in the middle of the road. It was tough to model that out. And at that point, we were just using Nitrogen for the questionnaire, which we thought was average at best.
Document Management: Microsoft SharePoint
We used to use Laserfiche for our document management. That was a change we made in the last 12 months, from an internal server using Laserfiche. Then, we made some tech moves where we started using Microsoft SharePoint. With that change, continuing to have Laserfiche didn’t seem to make sense. Even though Microsoft SharePoint is not a true document management system. That’s been a change for us. I don’t know if we’ll move back to a true document management system, but it’s going well.
As told to 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 wealthstack? Contact Rob Burgess at [email protected].