Shifting Capacity Towards High-value Activities

Blog
John Milne – 02/03/2022

Supporting our clients’ business by making growth manageable is at the core of SS&C’s Black Diamond® Wealth Platform’s existence. Every day before the market opens, we reconcile nearly three million accounts in time for trading and analysis. In addition, the Batch Reporting process supports firms throughout the year as they share over five million reports with their clients. And, as instant access is a crucial technology need, the Client Experience portal creates efficiencies for firms by providing clients with immediate answers to their portfolio questions.

As we help firms grow their business, the need for additional time-saving functionality is vital. As a result, we constantly evaluate scaling our data processes, ensuring reconciliation and cost basis information sync daily without limits.

In the past, we have received requests to automate the scheduling of Black Diamond’s Data Mining reports which are typically used for operational oversight. As a result, we made this feature broadly available to clients in late 2020. When evaluating the platform’s activity as we closed out 2021, we could see over 130K oversight reports had been delivered via the scheduling mechanism in the first year of this availability – reinforcing the importance of automating repetitive workflows.

As we continue to expand our reporting capabilities to focus on holistic client needs, we want to ensure advisory firms can adopt these capabilities without adding platform maintenance costs. There are several fronts where we’re focused on delivering these types of tools, including:

  • System automation: When there is specific data to keep in sync, automation rules can be created to enforce these cases. For example – if all advisors at a firm should have access to any Client Relationship when they have access to a given financial account associated with the client, we can enforce this. This year, the team’s focus is on householding automation connecting accounts to the proper Relationships and Portfolios without manual intervention.
  • Rules-based automation: When reporting on clients based on their net worth segmentation, a rules-based approach would help establish AUM breakpoints and maintain Client Segmentation more efficiently. For reporting on an asset tag related to an investments “liquidity” profile, certain investment types can be mapped to the liquidity categories to ensure that the majority of new investments can be automatically associated to their proper category.
  • Event-Driven Automation: When assigning a specific reporting target model to an account, firms can automate the assignment of a particular investment style or manager using an if this, then that approach. Another example could include automatically posting a welcome message to the relationship timeline upon inviting a client user to the platform.

 

In addition to automation rules, we’re making it easier to sync data directly with other systems in near real-time. And to further support technology integrations, we are continually growing the API suite availability. For example, clients’ using our technology suite today can create a relationship, contact, client user, relationship timeline post, as well as set up the client’s vault structure without ever logging into the platform.

Each of these paths is necessary to fully reduce repetitive toil for platform users, and the entire team values the input from our client base on which of these paths moves the needle most substantially.

To better understand how we reduce repetitive operations within the Black Diamond® Wealth Platform, request a personalized demo today.