Morningstar debuted improvements to its wealth tech platform at its annual conference this week, including a portfolio analytics feature and incorporation of model portfolios from several third-party asset managers.
Portfolios from BlackRock, Clark Capital, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price will now be available to advisors using the Morningstar Wealth platform. The move puts the investments alongside Morningstar’s own offerings with the aim of giving financial advisors more choice when selecting options for clients.
“The focus is a curated list of options for advisors,” said Daniel Needham, president of Morningstar Wealth. “We will continue to expand the lineup. It is driven by a rigorous qualitative & quantitative due diligence process… As advisors are faced with choice overload, it’s about flexibility and choice, but that it’s a thoughtful list of managers that they can use to build portfolios.”
The Morningstar Wealth analytics tool uses the firm’s proprietary research to rate investments, and has been added to the firm’s ByAllAccounts data and account aggregation product.
While addition of the portfolios is a first step, the company also plans to add separately managed accounts, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and alternative investments from other firms in the future, according to Needham.
“The significance of the two, across the wealth group, is that we are continuing to integrate our offerings and looking to deliver more value to advisors and wealth managers,” Needham said.
“The way we’ve bundled Morningstar’s unique security master list and the underlying datapoints that go with it with our market leading investment aggregation capability, that’s an example of how we are creating a group and building…It’s an example of how we can bring our insights into our products,” he said.
More specifically, the analytics features have been integrated with Morningstar Licensed Data are applied to aggregated portfolios and appends fund and equity attributes, including regional breakdowns, asset allocations, equity and fixed-income sector exposure, and equity and fixed-income style boxes to them.
