Eric Clarke, CEO of Orion Advisor Services, hopes a new app on Orion Connect will make it easier for advisors to use data to make decisions and implement strategies.
Orion Business Intelligence, which launches Thursday, is a digital update to the Business Metrics Reporting tool that Orion advisors have used for three years.
All of the analytics capabilities remain – transaction types, top performers, cash flows, client demographics, new accounts opened in a given time frame, or changes in assets under management over time – but advisors can now access them whenever they want instead of waiting for the monthly printed report to arrive. Business Intelligence also brings a major visual overhaul and allows advisors to take deeper dives and look at custom data sets.
“Our traditional reports did a good job but didn’t allow them to shape the data,” Clarke said. When advisors would get the reports, they would have to manually sift through the information and import the relevant parts into a spreadsheet. “Now they can view it exactly how they want.”
The pre-built Business Intelligence dashboard uses a Microsoft SQL server database to access the data, which Clarke said is a faster and easier way for advisors to filter through the massive volume of data. He added that the new visualizations encourage advisors to take action by helping them identify performance outliers.
In a statement, Ryan Beach, the president of CLS Investments, said he could use this to combine different data sets to analyze business strategies in new ways.
“Across 30,000 accounts, you can start to draw some interesting conclusions,” Beach said.
Clarke calls information about assets, demographics and peer-to-peer comparisons “small data,” and thinks advisors should incorporate it into their decision making before worrying about the so-called “big data.” But going forward, he wants to expand Business Intelligence’s capabilities by adding outside data sources.
“Things like Google Analytics and keyword searches so [advisors] can learn about how many people are coming to website and what are they searching,” Clarke said. “How do ad campaigns on social media impact hits on the website? Pair that with CRM data or other outside data sources, and assemble a picture of what’s going on in their business with [more than] we have at Orion.”
Business Intelligence will be available to Orion advisors for no extra charge, and will be added automatically to the Orion Connect platform.
