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Advent Announces Next Generation of the Black Diamond Wealth Management Platform

Submitted by Technology Tools for Today on September 8th, 2014


Designed to Elevate the Investor Experience and Enhance Firm Level Productivity

Powerful, Flexible, and Intuitive New Investor Experience, Enhanced Rebalancing, and New Firm and Enterprise Management Capabilities

Advent Software, Inc. at its annual client conference in Las Vegas, NV shared a preview of the next generation of its Black Diamond wealth management platform, which marks a major step in its evolution from a pioneer of cloud-based portfolio management and reporting technology to a full-featured wealth management platform. In addition to its industry leading reporting solutions the Black Diamond platform also offers an intuitive, native rebalancing application, firm and business intelligence reporting, data mining, and a dedicated service model designed to provide growing, sophisticated advisory firms with a solution that enhances the service they provide their clients and boosts firm productivity so they can grow with scale.

“Black Diamond’s roots are in empowering advisory firms by providing elegant technology solutions combined with great service to help solve the complex problems of advising clients and running a growing wealth management business,” said Dave Welling, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Black Diamond. “This next generation platform - what some of our clients are calling ‘Black Diamond 4.0’ - is a testament to Advent’s deep commitment to helping our advisory clients thrive.”

Founded in 2003, Advent’s Black Diamond redefined advisory reporting through its intuitive, dynamic portfolio management and reporting application. In 2010, Black Diamond launched BlueSky, the second generation of its industry leading application, which now supports over 565 advisory firms who manage over $266 billion in assets on the platform. In June of 2011, Black Diamond was acquired by Advent Software and has leveraged Advent’s deep experience in portfolio accounting and data management to dramatically expand its network of relationships with financial institutions for aggregation of custodial data as well as third party data for benchmarks, fixed income characteristics, and other reference data. Black Diamond’s new platform and latest enhancements leverage new cloud, mobile, and social technology as well as expand platform functionality well beyond its roots in advisory reporting.

The Black Diamond platform will include not only an increase in breadth of functionality but also a furthering of its commitment to integration with custodians and other third party technology. The new platform will enable a revolutionary integration approach where advisors can use the Black Diamond platform to publish or consume data or content to or from other systems.

New Technology-Enriched Investor Experience Coming Soon: Investor Portal, Document Vault, and Communications Tools

Black Diamond’s new platform will include a complete redesign of the online investor experience that will empower advisors to tailor their story to each of their clients. The new investor experience, which will be previewed at the conference and available early next year, will include a revamped investor portal that can be tailored to each individual client and be delivered through a web browser, tablets, phones, or other mobile devices. Core to the new investor experience is the expansion of capabilities to support a broader wealth management dialogue with clients, which led to the creation of a bi-directional document vault to help support the advisor-client-advisor workflow. Advisors will be able to post reports, financial planning documents, market commentary, and forms for clients to sign and return. A communication and notification system will leverage detailed client data or characteristics to target and tailor messages to each client by custodian, investment model, specific investment or any other data element in the system or criteria established by the advisor.

“We are excited about the next generation of the Black Diamond platform – it’s great to have a partner who understands the industry so well and has the technology and talent to anticipate our needs and build for the future. We are looking forward to seeing how the new investor portal, documents vault, and communications tools can help us interact with clients even more effectively, with a whole new level of personalization in our online and mobile interactions,” said Chris Casdia, Chief Compliance Officer, Homrich Berg.

“Our clients have always been co-architects of the technology that we deliver, and our new investor experience was developed based on years of experience serving advisors and listening to what they need to facilitate deeper engagement with their clients,” said Welling. “Our clients want technology that tells a story beyond investment performance to highlight the value they’re providing to their clients in their financial lives. This is about providing a technology solution that has the same depth, flexibility, and personalization that advisors can deliver when they meet with a client face-to-face.”

Redefining Rebalancing: Intuitive, Native Rebalancing Application Builds Momentum

In the past year, adoption of Black Diamond’s native Rebalancer has more than doubled. The Black Diamond team began development of the rebalancing application shortly after the acquisition by Advent with the vision of providing a robust, intuitive rebalancing solution that could enable advisors to rebalance portfolios at a household level across multiple custodians. In the past twelve months, Advent has invested in Black Diamond’s Rebalancer to streamline workflows and significantly deepen functionality to support the needs of its growing client base. New functionality includes support of firm-level rebalancing of models as well as client-driven workflows, tax-aware rebalancing, and strategic or tactical rebalancing.

“We’ve designed the rebalancing solution within the Black Diamond platform based on client feedback to make it intuitive within the native platform and consistent in look, feel, and workflow, as well as easy to implement, and tailored to the unique rebalancing workflows of an advisory firm,” said Welling.

Firm and Enterprise Management: Data Mining and Firm Reporting

At the conference, the Black Diamond team also unveiled the most recent enhancements to its data mining application, a robust data query and analysis tool. New and improved data mining functionality on the Black Diamond platform includes enhanced filtering capabilities and data fields to get desired data points. Advisors can query, access, and analyze their data in high-quality, aggregated formats from an agile, intuitive tool within the platform, providing efficiencies for compliance monitoring, research, ad hoc reporting, and business intelligence. Coming soon will be the ability to extract time-series data and cost basis data across all holdings. Since its initial launch last year, nearly two-thirds of all Black Diamond clients use the platform’s data mining capabilities.

“We use data mining and other recent enhancements as the base for our business intelligence and risk reporting,” said Eric Jardine, Senior Portfolio Manager at BakerAvenue Asset Management. “Flexible and simple tools like this enable our technology systems to work well together. We can now easily measure against our goals in less time.”

Backing Technology with Service and a Growing Community

Advent’s investment in new technology for the Black Diamond platform is rivaled by a parallel investment in service, operations, training, and implementation teams to help advisors get the most value out of the technology. Black Diamond has more than doubled its service team staffing in the last three years. The service team now represents more than 60 percent of the Black Diamond team.

Advent also announced the continued growth of Advent Direct® Community, its new online client experience that was announced at AdventConnect 2013. Black Diamond clients can now access the rapidly growing community of more than 10,000 registered individuals, of which more than 65 percent are active users. Since its launch this user-base of advisors, wealth managers, asset managers, and hedge fund managers from among Advent’s 4,300 clients have discussed more than 700 topics, which have been referenced more than 7,500 times.

According to Welling, “One of the most powerful opportunities of being an Advent client is that you get the opportunity to be part of an ecosystem that includes some of the biggest and most respected firms in the industry. As six of the top ten advisors in the country use Advent solutions, our clients have the opportunity to network, interact, and share best practices with some of the key leaders in the advisory industry.”

“Black Diamond’s innovative technology isn’t the only reason we’re a client; the people behind the technology and the back-office business processes they complete for us on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis are key differentiators. The Black Diamond team seems more like an extension of our office than an external provider,” said Mark Parker, Principal, Managing Director at Murphy, Middleton, Hinkle & Parker, Inc.

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