Unlocking the Power of APIs| How Black Diamond Transforms Financial Efficiency

At the heart of every thriving financial services business is a two-fold vision: an absolute focus on client needs and eliminating inefficiencies that divert from the client-centric focus. At SS&C Black Diamond, we live by this mantra and work towards extending our business to help power your success. To this end, Black Diamond’s Application Programming Interface (API) is an invaluable tool that can help you focus on your clients and eliminate inefficiencies through the power of automation.

What is an API anyway?

An API is a way to communicate with software using a well-documented, programmatic method. This helps create, modify, and delete data without going through the user interface manually. A long-time friend and colleague recently gave a poignant analogy: when you go to a restaurant and order an item off the menu, you simply ask for the dish – you don’t ask for the recipe and individual ingredients to be delivered. The folks in the kitchen know what you want when you ask for an item off the menu. In the same way, an API’s documentation is the menu, and you simply ask the API to deliver the results you seek.

Black Diamond’s own engineering framework, including advisor and client portals, internal tools, and reconciliation engine, all use the APIs. Let’s take an example: in Black Diamond‘s Client View, we need to display the market value for an account. Instead of retrieving the holding data for an account and manually calculating the underlying holdings, Client View can simply ask the relevant API to provide the market value for a given account. This has benefits that go towards the two-fold vision:

(a) The team that owns the specific area of the site can focus on its consumers’ needs, rather than on calculating the account’s market value<
(b) Utilizing the API to get the market value for an account eliminates the inefficiency of doing the calculation in multiple areas of the site

Now, let’s take a little more complicated example: within Client View, advisors can see all the accounts that belong to a client and the market values of each. Technically, our engineering team could inspect the client user record, check which accounts are assigned to that client, and then, for each account, sum up the holdings. This wildly inefficient software development practice would remove the focus from building Client View. Fortunately, a better method exists: the software can pass the user to an API, and the API can return the list of accounts and their market values within milliseconds.

Elevating Client Experiences and Powering Your Tech Stack

One of the greatest achievements of my career has been making our Black Diamond API suite available to our clients. In the past decade, we have made our APIs available to our partners and clients and have spent thousands of hours as a team learning how our clients utilize their tech stack. As a result, our enterprise-grade API suite addresses not just the basic use cases that you expect but also many intricate operations that can help you tailor custom experiences.

We are committed to empowering financial advisors by offering the tools they need to enhance efficiency and focus on delivering exceptional client experiences. Our APIs play a key role in helping clients streamline operations, integrate systems, and eliminate inefficiencies that detract from client-centric service. Here are some ways our Black Diamond API suite can transform your business:

• Client Experience
  Integrate seamlessly with external platforms such as banking systems and proprietary front ends, allowing firms to present their clients with a unified view of their financial life. By enabling single sign-on and smooth data sharing, it creates a more cohesive and accessible client experience.
• Document Management
  Managing client documents is simplified, with all important financial documents stored in a single location, the Black Diamond Vault, providing easy access and reducing the administrative burden for advisors and clients alike.
• Data Automation
  With Black Diamond API, firms can have real-time access to updated, reconciled data. It powers internal dashboards and reporting tools, enabling you to quickly retrieve and analyze data, improving decision-making and client service. Black Diamond APIs power industry best rebalancing, planning, and analytics solutions and these same APIs are available to you to power your own tools.
• Efficient Onboarding and Maintenance
  The API eliminates the need for redundant data entry across multiple systems. It automates client onboarding and seamlessly syncs CRM, custodian, and planning tool data. Advisors can focus on relationship-building rather than manual administrative tasks.
• User Management Automation
  By integrating with in-house systems, firms can automate user management. When new advisors onboard, the APIs automatically updates user records, assigns appropriate accounts, and can even send the invite email, ensuring smooth operations with minimal manual intervention.

More Bespoke Solutions

Our technology becomes an extension of your marketing as firms can use Black Diamond APIs to create outstanding experiences that help win more business. For example, during a meeting with a prospect, you can automatically create a client user. You can upload documents, like onboarding paperwork and disclosures, directly to the Vault using the Black Diamond API. You can also create a Timeline post to welcome the prospect to the firm. Finally, during the meeting, you can send an invite to the user without ever taking focus away from the client. By adding the white-labeled Black Diamond mobile application, you ensure that, before the meeting ends, the prospect has your firm’s brand on their device, along with all the information they need at their fingertips.

Consulting – Service at the heart of API

Our APIs come with everything engineering teams expect from an enterprise-grade platform. This includes a well-documented schema in OpenAPI3 spec, a dedicated developer portal, a sandbox with fabricated data, and common workflows that can help you get started. Additionally, firms often want to leverage our expertise to help their engineering teams tailor their solutions. With a team that has worked on Black Diamond API for years, our consulting resources can help you build better solutions faster.

By using Black Diamond APIs, clients can leverage an enterprise-grade API to reduce the noise that takes time away from what matters the most: the client focus. These APIs can be used to power everything from enhanced client experiences to user automation to wonderfully unique solutions. The best part is that we love working on these APIs and using them ourselves to power our platform.

To learn how the SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Platform can support your unique advisory business with Black Diamond API, request your personal demo, call 1-800-727-0605, or email info@advent.com.