Independent Financial Partners, a hybrid registered investment advisor preparing to launch its own broker/dealer next year, has contracted with three software companies to support the brokerage.
IFP, the family-owned RIA with LPL Financial, announced it had reached agreements with Agreement Express, Beam Solutions and Xtiva, investments that CEO William Hamm said will make his advisors’ lives easier.
“Generally, hybrid RIAs don’t have the latitude or financials to be able to implement expensive technologies that otherwise would positively impact advisors’ businesses,” Hamm said in a statement. “On the other hand, independent broker-dealers, not only have control of their own destiny, but they are also able to better control and enhance their revenue lines. As such, IFP has been able to invest in systems to support the advisor experience we’ve always wanted to provide.”
Agreement Express enables advisors to digitally prepopulate new account forms and distribute them to clients who can electronically sign them. The documents will then go to IFP’s compliance team and to one of the firm’s four custodians (Pershing, Charles Schwab, Fidelity or TD Ameritrade), where the account will be opened automatically. The software solution will also help advisors to easily transition their accounts to the new broker/dealer with its mass prepopulation and distribution capabilities.
To maintain compliant by surveilling transactions for suspicious activities and to implement anti-money laundering guardrails, IFP is integrating software by Beam Solutions, a firm founded by the former chief compliance officer of Facebook Payments and uses machine learning to enhance transaction monitoring.
Xtiva is a compensation management and reporting software for b/ds and RIAs, which the IFP said was the “clear winner for the firm’s compensation solution, solving for a commonly lacking area of support at independent broker-dealers.”
In July, IFP hired former McKinsey & Company director Bill McCauley to be the firm’s chief financial officer. Hamm said McCauley “knows how to interact with FINRA well” and has ”seen what a well-run broker-dealer looks like at a large scale and will bring that experience to IFP.”
IFP is headquartered in Tampa, Fla. and its 500 advisors across the U.S. manage more than $40 billion in client assets.
