Wealth management technology provider MyVest has announced several upgrades to its Strategic Portfolio System platform. The firm, a subsidiary of TIAA, serves large enterprise providers including independent broker/dealers and banks.
Among the additions, all of which focus on higher levels of automation and improved client personalization, are what the firm refers to as intelligent security-level substitution, tax budget management features and improved cash management for complex strategies.
“Personalization of portfolios has been a manual process that doesn’t scale,” MyVest CEO Anton Honikman said. And therefore, to date, much of this personalization has only been conveyed to a limited number of clients at any given firm.
“These types of features can only be unlocked through technology over time,” he said. “So, this release isn’t a new module but improvement in supporting the automation of personalization empowering advisors to tackle it at scale and apply it to more than just their most valuable relationships.”
This new enhancement supports model-level replacements to better accommodate certain client circumstances. Examples would include preserving embedded gains in the event of a transition, managing exposures through the wash sale period of a tax-loss harvest and being able to optimize security placement based on taxable or tax-exempt account types.
The improved tax budget management features add more automation for advisors managing portfolios by introducing “tax budget constraint” during the rebalancing and optimization process. In other words, during a rebalance, the system will automatically adjust and only propose trades that adhere to the investor’s tax budget criteria and trade order priorities. According to the firm, this can substantially shrink the time advisors devote to manually reviewing portfolios in search of potentially large gains.
Finally, with its improved cash management for complex strategies features, SPS helps advisors with more nuanced use cases. For example, advisors can selectively remove cash targets from models, and normalize the remaining model positions, enabling them to better control the client’s cash exposure and avoid excessive cash accumulation.
Jason Creel, managing director, Individual Investment Solutions at TIAA, said in a statement that his team had collaborated extensively with MyVest on the enhancements.
"MyVest's SPS continues to add automation of complex tasks that frees up time for our advisors and portfolio managers, and allows them to better personalize portfolios to the unique circumstances of each client," he said.
Asked about what is ahead on MyVest’s roadmap, Honikman pointed to two areas.
“We also recognize that advisors need to be able to convey the value of this tax management and personalization to their clients through analytics and reporting and we are investing in that in future and the impact thereof,” he said.
While Honikman said that because his firm remains privately held and does not share specific usage metrics, he confirmed that MyVest’s technology is used by thousands of advisors at large enterprises that are managing billions in client assets.
MyVest was awarded Best Rebalancing Provider for its Portfolio Management Suite at the 2018 WealthManagement.com Industry Awards.
