Orion Advisor Services announced that they are launching a new communications feature, called Event Driven Notifications, for advisors on their platform. The tool, introduced at the firm’s Ascent 2018 conference, will link a dozen standard email templates with a list of clients, semi-automating communication from birthday well wishes to notifications for required minimum distributions (RMDs) and rebalancing.
It’s part of Orion’s push to facilitate an increase in scale for advisors on its platform, Orion CEO Eric Clarke said. “I think it’s very ad hoc what’s happening today,” he said of client communication. He estimated that advisors using Event Driven Notifications will save up to two hours per day, as the steps of moving between lists of clients needing communication and the communication that needs to be sent will be merged.
The tool, built in-house, will allow an advisor to simultaneously sign off on the communication and add a sentence or two of personalization, on an “instance” screen, before it is sent to the client. It’s designed to make it easier for advisors to see a list of clients and what communication or notifications they need. It will also integrate with Orion’s Trends feature, giving advisors insights into the emails that are best received. A copy of the correspondence is automatically retained for compliance purposes.
With each new major technology addition, Clarke said his aim is to provide at least a 10 percent scale increase, noting that currently each advisor on the Orion platform currently services around 150 households.
The tool will be available for around six beta testers in the end of 2018, with an expected full deployment in February 2019.
