Advyzon Launches Turnkey Asset Management Program, Advyzon Investment Management (AIM)

New TAMP offering built on Advyzon's cloud-based, award-winning platform is natural evolution based on advisor sentiment

CHICAGO, March 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Advyzon, a comprehensive technology platform and portfolio management solution for financial advisors and investment managers, today announced the launch of a new turnkey asset management program (TAMP): Advyzon Investment Management (AIM). Executives say that this is the natural evolution of Advyzon's offering based on sentiment gathered via a survey of Advyzon's advisor client base, as well as listening to their expressed needs over the past several years in ongoing consultative conversations.

AIM's offering will allow advisors to be more efficient via a better integrated user experience by providing their new TAMP services conveniently within Advyzon's single source code platform. TAMP services allow advisors to outsource, without losing oversight and control, a variety of functions that are core to their business, such as investment selection, portfolio/model allocations, reporting, rebalancing, and back/mid office services, which can free up a significant amount of time and resources. In turn, financial advisors can use this freed up capacity to help scale their business, focusing on new client acquisition initiatives, spending more quality time on current client relationships, and focusing on financial planning aspects.

"One of the most strategically significant advantages we have in the marketplace is that AIM is built on the award-winning Advyzon platform, giving it a solid foundation for advisors to, in-turn, take advantage of our investment and service offering," said Lee Andreatta, Chief Executive Officer of Advyzon Investment Management, an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience including as a producing advisor. "We've assembled an amazing, highly motivated team to build on Advyzon's past successes in the industry and I couldn't be more excited!"

Initially, AIM will offer risk-based models including active/passive mutual funds and ETFs, a tax-sensitive ETF only solution, an ESG active/passive model, an alternative model, and direct indexing, as well as tools and methodologies around tax optimization and tax loss harvesting. AIM plans to continue to build out additional investment products around all of these core offerings, as well as offer new strategies, in the months to come.

"Each of our investment portfolios are long-term oriented, highly diversified, and low cost – tilting toward factors that typically deliver superior risk and return over time," said Brian Huckstep, Chief Investment Officer of AIM, who spent fifteen years as a Senior Portfolio Manager, managing over $14B as head of U.S. Asset Allocation at Morningstar. "By offering target equity portfolios across a broad risk spectrum and portfolio sets designed for both qualified and taxable accounts, we believe that our portfolios can help investors achieve the majority of their long-term and short-term financial goals."

In addition to their investment offering, AIM will provide a personalized service model to advisors based on their philosophy of insourcing versus outsourcing. AIM's service team members will be personally assigned to individual advisors and will take the time to truly understand their businesses, doing the heavy lifting on the whole lifecycle of an account including account opening, billing, reporting, trading, data reconciliation, and acting as a custodial liaison.

"Our service model is focused on providing a technology forward, highly personalized offering," said Meghan Holmes, Chief Operating Officer of AIM, who spent the past 14 years at Schwab in their Advisor Services vertical in a variety of advisor-facing roles, including service, transition, and relationship management. "In leveraging the Advyzon platform, we're able to digitize and automate many aspects of the advisor experience, while learning about the advisor's practice and how best to support their growth."

The management team behind AIM has more than 70 years of combined industry experience and have consistently been advocates in the marketplace on behalf of financial advisors:

"We view financial advisors as champions in their respective communities," expressed Andreatta. "They're supporters of local sports teams and advertisers on the back of church bulletins, they act as financial mentors who take the time to educate the populace, and they serve a critical role in our society. They help solve aspirational issues related to retirement and education planning, as well as truly difficult issues relating to divorce, incapacitation, and death. As such, anything we can do to help financial advisors better perform in this capacity is our mission."

NATURAL EVOLUTION OF ADVYZON'S OFFERING

Advyzon's cloud-based platform combines portfolio management, customizable performance reporting, trading and rebalancing, client web portals, client relationship management (CRM), client billing, document storage, and now, turnkey asset management with AIM, making it easy for advisors to run their financial planning and investment advisory firms while managing their client accounts with efficiency and ease. Over the years, the Advyzon team began to see that advisors wanted additional, comprehensive options for asset management solutions without having to look outside of Advyzon's award-winning comprehensive platform. Therefore, creating a TAMP was a natural evolution for Advyzon.

"AIM will, in a sense, be eating the Advyzon cooking," said John Mackowiak, Chief Business Development Officer at Advyzon. "They are using the Advyzon platform for reporting, Advyzon's Quantum rebalancer for rebalancing, and Advyzon's technology as a whole, which provides a solid foundation to ensure that this is a success. In addition, this will have a secondary benefit in that if AIM runs into a limitation and needs to add a feature, it's going to improve our already highly rated platform and benefit our user base overall."

"As we've worked with financial advisors over the years, we began to see that the user experience was a bit disjointed," said Hailin Li, Founder and CEO of Advyzon. "They began to ask us for a more seamless experience that would include all of the elements needed to create and manage portfolios for their clients with the expert research and support of a professional investment officer and administrative team. We have always focused on the user experience with our technology – that's one of the reasons we've grown in market share so quickly over the years. The AIM TAMP is a direct result of listening to the advisors who use the Advyzon platform."

Advyzon Investment Management is now available to all current Advyzon users as well as advisors everywhere. Interested parties can learn more at www.AdvyzonIM.com.

THE ADVYZON INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT TEAM

Lee Andreatta, MBA serves as Chief Executive Officer of AIM and has worked in the financial services industry for nearly 25 years. He began his career with Merrill Lynch as a Financial Advisor and has spent a majority of his career within the custodial, financial software, data, and research space. In 2007, Lee joined Morningstar and was eventually promoted to a Key Account Manager role where he represented Morningstar's entire product suite. Since then, he's effectively helped several firms, most recently Charles Schwab & Co. in their custodial Advisor Services vertical, with business development and strategic account management efforts. Lee brings a unique perspective to the financial services industry having been a frontline advisor selling financial products and services, as well as working at some of the best custodial, research, and technology firms in the world today. He attained his MBA from the University of Notre Dame.

Brian Huckstep, CFA®, CFP®, MBA serves as Chief Investment Officer of AIM and brings 30 years of experience in the investment industry to the firm. He began his career in commercial banking at Bank One before spending the next nine years doing retirement plan auditing and investment software management at Northern Trust. In 2003, Brian joined Morningstar as a Director in their Mutual Fund Data Team. In 2005, Brian moved to Ibbotson Associates (later purchased by Morningstar) and spent fifteen years as Senior Portfolio Manager and head of U.S. Asset Allocation. As a portfolio manager, he managed over $14 billion of diversified fund-of-fund strategies for large broker-dealers, mutual fund companies, insurance companies, and strategist platforms. He attained his MBA from the University of Chicago and is a CFP® professional and CFA® Charterholder.

Meghan Holmes, MBA serves as Chief Operating Officer of AIM after being focused on the independent RIA space for 15 years. She started her career as an advisor in training with independent financial services firm North Star Resource Group before joining Charles Schwab & Co. in 2008, devoting the next 14 years to the RIA custody space, working in service, transition, sales, and relationship management capacities. Most recently, Meghan supported advisors affiliated with Schwab Advisor Services' largest enterprise clients and specialized in working with advisors dedicated to the ultra-high-net-worth space. Meghan brings great insight to AIM after working with RIAs in sales and operational roles across all segments of advisor businesses – from newly emerging firms to the largest national and strategic acquirers in the industry. She attained her MBA from Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

ADVYZON FEATURED IN KITCES TECHNOLOGY REPORY

In 2021, Kitces Research launched an invitation-only survey for the tens of thousands of advisors in the Kitces community. They created a unique URL specific to each person invited to participate in the survey, which could only be used once, thus preventing any sharing by advisors or the technology companies they use. The results are detailed in a 74-page report called The Technology That Independent Financial Advisors Actually Use (And Like) [Kitces Report, Volume 1, 2021].

"Our readers tend to be more advice-centric (i.e., less likely to be primarily selling products for commissions), fiduciary-minded, slightly younger than the average advisor, and committed enough to continuing education that they self-select into consuming our in-depth, long-form educational content," said the report's lead researcher Derek T. Tharp, Ph.D., CFP®, CLU®, RICP®. "As a result of these background psychographics, our sample is significantly more likely to have CFP® certification and is more likely to come from the independent RIA (or hybrid RIA) channel than from a broker/dealer (though our survey sample included many advisors from each of those channels)."

Key takeaways from the report:

"From the perspective of advisor satisfaction, Advyzon's combined CRM-plus-portfolio-reporting was a notable standout, scoring ratings as high as competitors like Wealthbox and Redtail, but with far less market share as a relative newcomer to the category... which suggests that Advyzon in particular is a vendor worth watching in the future, as their high satisfaction rate implies a likely upwards trajectory in advisor adoption (i.e., above-average future growth)." – Page 19

"Performance Reporting software is a unique category within advisor software, as it is by far the most crowded category on the Kitces AdvisorTech Map, with more than 50 vendors competing for market share with various combinations of portfolio management, trading, and related investment management functions, on top of the core feature of performance reporting." But according to the report, the existing market leaders did not stand out in terms of satisfaction levels. Advyzon rated higher than the incumbents. – Page 24

"Advyzon gained a very material uptick in market share last year – winning an absolute level of market share that was less than Orion but on par with Black Diamond and Tamarac, which, relative to its lower market share, made it a leader in growth momentum…" – Page 26

In the Document Management category: "Microsoft OneDrive and Advyzon saw the largest total gains. On a forward-looking basis, most advisors were still not sure what provider they would go with. Microsoft OneDrive and Box had the highest anticipated gains in total numbers, while Advyzon again looked strong relative to their currently small market share." – Page 30

ABOUT ADVYZON

Advyzon provides comprehensive, intuitive, cloud-based, wealth management technology – and now a turnkey asset management program (TAMP) – for independent financial advisors and registered investment advisors (RIAs). The Advyzon tech platform combines portfolio management, customizable performance reporting, trading and rebalancing, client web portals, client relationship management (CRM), client billing, and document storage. A team of entrepreneurs led by CEO Hailin Li, Ph.D., CFA®, Advyzon strives to innovate in strategic and useful ways. Financial advisors inspire their innovation and integrations, and their exceptional technology and unmatched service exist to improve the advisor experience – whether it's via portfolio and firm management or client relationships and growth. To learn more about Advyzon, visit www.Advyzon.com. To learn more about AIM, visit www.AdvyzonIM.com.

Media Contact:
Jonny Swift
Impact Communications, Inc.
913-649-5009
[email protected]

SOURCE Advyzon