Schwab Advisor Services announced Tuesday enhancements to its Institutional Intelligent Portfolios offering for advisors. The most important of these is a fully digital (meaning paperless) account conversion feature that lets advisors quickly transfer existing Charles Schwab brokerage accounts to advisor-branded automated investment accounts. According to a prepared statement, this new conversion can take mere minutes.
Other enhancements include an increase in the available number of funds to a total of 2,700 mutual funds and 1,400 ETFs and the availability of “unlimited” portfolio-modeling capabilities that includes now “infinite” model creation and custom drift settings.
Advisors also now have the ability to handle inherited IRA accounts and can initiate the digital account open process on a client’s behalf given proper permissions.
According to Schwab, since its launch in 2015, more than 1,100 advisory firms have signed on to use Institutional Intelligent Portfolios, though total assets under management in the platform were not disclosed. In April, Schwab Advisor Services announced that its web-based Portfolio Connect portfolio management application had come out of “early access” and into general availability.
In July, WealthManagement.com reported that since the end of March, Charles Schwab’s subscription-based Intelligent Portfolios Plus platform for individual investors had attracted $1 billion in new assets under management for the wealth management firm.
Total client assets managed within Schwab’s various digital advisory solutions totals $41.0 billion, as of Q2 2019, according to a Schwab representative. That number includes Institutional Intelligent Portfolios, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, and Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Premium.
