SYSTM Wealth Solutions LLC has launched the first of what will be three core components of its new cloud-based platform for financial advisors and asset managers serving ultra-high-net-worth clients.
SYSTM is a company created out of investment banking and wealth management firm William Blair, which has a majority stake in the business. It has also partnered with cloud-based technology provider InvestCloud, which has collaborated on the project and contributed and integrated many components to the ecosystem that will form the completed platform.
SYSTM Marketplace, a turnkey asset management platform supporting separately managed accounts and unified managed accounts that provide advisors a vetted menu of investment products and strategies, is the first piece to launch and is now live.
The other two core components, a full-service advisor platform and a thought leadership and research library, will be rolled out over the coming months.
Advisors will have access to InvestCloud’s native CRM system, financial planning (via its NaviPlan offering), proposal generation, client and advisor portals, and client reporting, trading and analytics as well as banking capabilities, insurance, alternatives and structured products and other offerings.
“We want SYSTM to be the choice for the UHNW advisor,” said Brad Goodman, head of platform at SYSTM.
“I say that just based on my experience; in so many cases I have seen firms that want to build from the bottom up—we are really thinking about how top advisors want to operate their practices—how do we design processes and components to marry those two things together,” he said, noting that over time the development philosophy should allow the platform to meet the needs of a wide range of advisors, including smaller shops.
Goodman said Marketplace already has 1,500 live accounts, representing $1.4 billion in assets across 95 different strategies.
The genesis of building out a new platform first started to take shape five years ago, Goodman said, and was more internally focused. Back then, William Blair’s private wealth group—which currently has about 120 advisors and approximately $57 billion in assets that sit under the WB brand or with partner firms—had relationships with many different third party providers.
Building a platform to support and attract breakaway advisors outside William Blair really gained momentum over the last two years, he said.
SYSTM’s platform is multi-custodial, having relationships with Schwab, Fidelity, and soon Pershing, said Goodman. InvestCloud, for its part, has relationships with many others.
“We see the advisor platform as a one-stop-shop, a complete landing location that can do everything from client proposals, client reporting, planning, all on one single data model utilizing the full capabilities of InvestCloud,” he said. “So, that means that with our structured products available in the Marketplace, you will be able to flow that into your financial planning, etc. and that’s not something I’ve seen in the marketplace today.”
InvestCloud is a global financial technology provider that serves a wide range of firms from midsize advisory shops to top 10 banking behemoths like HSBC on a global basis. The firm has 25 million accounts on its systems that represent $6.4 trillion in assets under management or advisement. It has 1,300 full time employees and approximately 300 contractors.
“One of the nice things about our platform is how massively customizable it is and the number of personas available; we have hundreds of personas which can grow from very simplistic to very sophisticated,” said InvestCloud CEO John Wise, noting that this equates to a massive amount of data about clients and users.
For those unfamiliar the use of personas is an interactive design technique and philosophy; as IBM defines it a "persona is an archetype of a user that helps designers and developers empathize by understanding their users' business and personal contexts."
“We track every single click on the platform from 2011 to today,” he said, referring to the vast data warehouse InvestCloud maintains.
“One of the things we differentiate on from an Orion or Envestnet is that their core is hard coded and changing them is very difficult,” said Wise.
SYSTM’s Goodman said that having this amount of flexibility and richness of data available through InvestCloud will help them continue to develop the platform to meet the needs of advisors in the future.
“Our advisors told us what they and clients needed and could not find in the marketplace. We think there is a huge opportunity out there,” said Goodman.
