Today’s advisors rely on various solutions to run their businesses – portfolio management, proposal generation, new account opening, trading, financial planning, and more. Achieving a fully integrated technology that helps enhance the advisor-client relationship has always been a dream of advisors, regardless of which channel they operate. Large enterprises have tackled integration inefficiencies on their own by resolving to build proprietary platforms. Those with enough capital have made significant investments to improve their advisor’s experience while smaller to mid-size financial services enterprises continue to struggle. At Orion, we aim to address the issue by creating a tech-enabled fiduciary process that transforms the advisor client-relationship by allowing financial advisors to prospect, plan, invest, and achieve within a single, connected, technology-driven experience.

According to Celent Research, portal logins are as low as 10%, and it’s due to a surplus of portals offering too few features. Orion’s Client Portal cuts right to the heart of this issue by creating a single sign on portal that provides all the insights, tools, and interactions investors need to run their financial lives. The Orion Client portal allows investors to connect every aspect of their financial life, including their financial plan, investment performance, allocations, spending, linked accounts, and document storage. The Portal is available to advisors for no additional cost, can be customized or white-labeled, and is offered via desktop and a mobile app.

To bridge the behavioral gap and improve investor outcomes, Orion infused academic research and behavioral psychology into the technology advisors use every day, including risk profiling and financial planning proposal tools. The new 3D Risk Profile adds depth to the risk tolerance questionnaire (RTQ) by measuring a third dimension of ‘composure’ in addition to the traditional measurements of ‘tolerance’ and ‘capacity.’ By integrating behavioral finance into the RTQ, Orion transforms one of the first advisor-client interactions. The addition of a ‘composure’ measurement focuses on the psychology behind a client’s decision. The resulting 3D Risk Profile creates new opportunities for advisors to tailor portfolios based on a clients’ true risk tolerance, ensuring alignment with asset allocation recommendations, individual goals, and their ability to stay the course.

An investor’s financial life is a complicated mix of dreams, present realities, and potential negative outcomes to avoid. By bucketing investments into distinct areas, advisors can help their clients work toward unique goals, not arbitrary benchmarks. Created by Dr. Daniel Crosby, Orion’s Chief Behavioral Officer, the Protect, Live, Dream workflow combines Orion’s best-in-class technology with behavioral finance to create a goals-based investing solution that keeps investors on track. The simple elegance of the Protect, Live, Dream approach is that it speaks to each of the voices in an investor’s head. The Protect bucket consists of not only “safe” assets, but also the income potential of human capital. The Live bucket contains investment assets needed to sustain a lifestyle. And the Dream bucket funds our aspirations.

Behavioral finance, the study and application of psychology to investment outcomes, is rapidly growing in popularity—and for good reason. As our industry changes, financial advisors are increasingly called upon to act as behavioral coaches, guiding not only their clients’ portfolios but also their behavior and investment decisions. To help advisors grow their practices and strengthen client relationships, Orion delivers BeFi tools through technology and education to help advisors infuse BeFi into their practices and differentiate themselves. One of the most popular BeFi industry resources is the Standard Deviations Podcast. This weekly show looks at money, mind and meaning, through a psychological lens and is hosted by psychologist, New York Times bestselling author and Orion’s Chief Behavioral Officer, Dr. Daniel Crosby.

As founder and CEO of Orion, Eric Clarke is responsible for setting a future-forward vision and advancing Orion’s contributions to independent advisor success, our industry, and weathtech innovation overall. Eric leads the Orion organization in its mission to help advisory professionals operationalize their vision for success by delivering cutting-edge financial technology and investment management solutions through the company’s brand entities: Orion Advisor Tech, Orion Portfolio Solutions and Brinker Capital. As adept in the role of strategic visionary as he is product developer, Eric is a humble, accessible leader focused on creating a culture of innovation and solving the challenges that burden independent advisors. For his work, Eric has received numerous accolades including ThinkAdvisor’s IA25 in 2012 and 2019, and InvestmentsNews’ Innovator Award in 2019.

Orion aims to disrupt the status quo of data delivery and is championing an industry-wide effort to accelerate the adoption of data streaming technology to improve data accessibility and transparency for independent advisors. By leveraging state-of-the-art data streaming (Apache Kafka) and cloud-based data warehousing technologies (AWS Red Shift), Orion is taking a leading role to bring this service to market and unite the industry in a future-forward effort to move away from antiquated data infrastructure and processes. Newer cloud technologies have the power to reshape our industry and offer an elegant solution to the ongoing issue of stale data and inefficient data delivery. With data streaming, advisors gain fast, efficient access to the data they need to manage their businesses.

Approximately 50% of Orion’s 2300 advisor clients manage alternative assets including real estate, private equity and hedge funds, which serve an important role in investor portfolios. However, outdated processes and manual data entry are sources of frustration and inefficiency for independent advisors utilizing alternatives. A mix-matched approach to data and report formats and over reliance on manual processes has hindered advisors for decades.  Through its acquisition of Pantenix, Orion acquired OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to power a new alternative asset data maintenance tool called Orion Vision. Orion Vision uses advanced OCR technology and an algorithmic multi-step analytic process to extract data intelligently and accurately from the General Partners PDF reports into a format compatible with any portfolio accounting system saving advisors time and resources.