In an effort to better incorporate BNY Mellon’s digital offerings, Pershing is launching a new suite of technology enhancements that use the NEXEN investment platform.
Pershing’s chief information officer Ram Nagappan said the focus is on improving the experience for advisors by making integration easier, data more accessible and enhancing collaboration between advisors and their clients.
Throughout 2017, Pershing will expand the number of enterprise and third-party APIs available in its NetXServices API Store. By opening up access to data, Pershing is looking to give advisors the flexibility to select their own customized technology stack, whether it’s Pershing’s own technology, third-party products or the advisor’s own proprietary front-end technology.
“The Integrated Wealth Experience will allow firms to efficiently manage their brokerage and advisory business regardless of how they consume our technology,” Nagappan said in a statement. He added that Pershing aims to go beyond single sign-on and support customization at the feature-function level to give advisors more granular control of their technology.
Eventually, Pershing wants to offer an App Store where firms can access components on their own.
Pershing first announced plans to open up its APIs to third party developers at last year’s INSITE conference in Orlando. The 2017 conference kicks off Wednesday in San Diego, where Pershing will demonstrate to advisors the progress it has made in this area.
The company will also show off a new front-end portal it's calling NetX360-Wealth. The portal will tie together brokerage custody, bank custody and advisory platforms into a single user experience and integrate with reporting, aggregation, CRM, portfolio management and financial planning tools.
NetX360-Wealth will include capabilities built in collaboration with IBM Watson, a partnership Pershing also announced at last year’s INSITE conference, to show advisors trends related to client behavior and goal planning needs. Specific use cases include looking at client life-events, attrition prediction and money in motion.
Additionally, Pershing is using data and machine learning to build new chatbots that focus on digital advice, emotion detection and helping clients assess their digital maturity.
Pershing’s strategy of supporting third-party integration with APIs and building a central portal for advisors to access all of their technology is similar to strategies adopted by other major custodians, particularly TD Ameritrade’s Veo Open Access marketplace and Veo One portal.
Fidelity allows integration with select technologies via eMoney, which it acquired in 2015, and is working on building an ecosystem of its own technology that uses a proprietary, multicustodial database.
