BNY Mellon’s Pershing X unveiled its long-anticipated multicustodial wealth management platform on Tuesday during Pershing’s annual INSITE conference, held in Orlando, Fla.
Dubbed Wove, the platform—which has been under development since Pershing X was created in late 2021—integrates advisor tech into a single, “data-driven” and multicustodial platform, according to Pershing X President Ainslie Simmonds. Simmonds, who has held executive roles at LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual, joined Pershing to lead the effort after heading up digitization at PIMCO Investments.
“I came to BNY Mellon after spending years in the industry inspired by the chance to solve a problem so big the industry has actually given it a name,” she said. “The swivel chair, that problem of disconnected technology and data. And I could never really understand why the industry made it so hard for advisors to do their jobs.”
The Wove platform features core applications such as advanced data reporting and analytics, AI-enabled financial plan building, billing, cross-custodian trading and rebalancing. All applications are integrated with built-in workflows controlled by a central operating system that functions behind a single screen.
“It will help you quickly build portfolios, but then it carries those recommendations to a tax optimization application,” said Simmonds. “That tax optimization application immediately solves for the best tax-optimized transition—in fact, you can even enter a specific tax budget that you and your client have agreed on—but then that immediately connects right into the multicustody account opening application, which allows you to sync information to and from your CRM and open across custodians from one place. And of course, when you're ready to execute, you can go seamlessly to the trade rebalancing application that will help you trade the account.”
“That’s pretty cool,” one conference attendee said.
The platform is supported by a cloud-based data “superset,” created with help from Albridge Wealth Reporting that is a compilation of investor, enterprise and platform data (Albridge is an affiliate of Pershing that it acquired in 2011).
Some features, such as the trading and portfolio management tools, were developed in-house. Others represent collaborations with companies such as cloud-native data warehouse company Snowflake and financial planning startup Conquest. The direct indexing technology was acquired in late 2021 when Pershing bought Optimal Asset Management.
Wove also supports third-party applications, Simmonds said, inviting any “modern tech providers out there” to reach out about integrating with the new platform. At last year’s conference, however, Bryan Hamilton, the head of design and user experience at Pershing X, said third-party integrations would be “impossible” to make function as seamlessly as the fully integrated system.
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“I think it’s great that Pershing is getting more innovative in this traditionally conservative and slow-moving area of custody and clearing,” said Oleg Tishkevich, the founder and CEO of Invent. He said he's excited to take Simmonds up on her offer to "learn more about the open architecture platform and how they engage with vendors to streamline some of the workflows.”
Tishkevitch said he's specifically interested in learning what new API solutions will be made available to vendors around custodian workflows used by RIAs.
Executives also announced that BNY Mellon Advisors will offer investment solutions through Wove via a newly created in-house team of senior BNY Mellon investment managers and said advisors on the platform will have access to direct indexing investment strategies. This includes the new, customizable BNY Mellon Precision Direct Indexing S&P 500, managed by BNY Mellon Investment Management’s indexing specialist Mellon.
“Your operating model is becoming more complex and more costly to operate,” said BNY Mellon | Pershing CEO Jim Crowley. “The demand for faster tech, better tech, data aggregation applications. On top of that, data risk tools, credit tools, compliance tools, outsource portfolio trading tools—all of these demands are creating more complexity and more costs for your business, consuming more of your checkbook and consuming more of your time.
“And the same is true at Pershing. That’s why we are so focused on transformation and simplicity so that, together, we can go beyond,” he said in a reference to this year’s conference theme—Go Beyond.
