As the largest gathering of the advisor technology community outside Joel Bruckenstein's T3 conferences, TD Ameritrade's "Veo Village" featured the latest and greatest in advisor tech in 2017.
Held in early February at the TDAI LINC conference in San Diego, Veo Village features the best of the 115 technology vendors who have integrated their systems and software with TDAI's innovative Veo advisor workstation.
(Check out ThinkAdvisor's coverage of the National LINC conference.)
This year, over 70 tech partners demonstrated their wares at the TDAI LINC conference in an expo that took up nearly the entire second floor of the massive Manchester Grand Hyatt.
"When we launched the Veo Open Access integration project seven years ago, we had about five vendors initially," said Jon Patullo, managing director of technology for TDAI, said. "This year we have 115 integration partners and, due to space constraints, were limited to 70 with a long waiting list."
Key to success for TDAI's initiative is the innovative use of application program interfaces (APIs) to automate the process of passing data between systems.
"The real benefit of opening up the Veo API is now we have 115 development teams working on efficiencies for advisors – the collective weight of the entire advisor technology community is focused, providing tremendous leverage for advisors," noted Chris Valleley, director of technology solutions for TDAI.
Top of the list for the news out of the Veo Village was the official launch of TDAI's integration platform, Veo One, with 14 integrated technology partners, including CRM vendors Junxure, Redtail and Salesforce; financial planning systems eMoney, Envestnet Logix and Money Guide Pro; portfolio management platforms SS&C Advent's Black Diamond, Morningstar and Orion; along with DocuSign, Laser App and Laserfiche for workflow automation and document management. Rounding out the new integrations are TDAI's iRebal rebalancer and ThinkPipes trading platform.
Veo One is TDAI's response to a tall order from advisors: to create operational efficiencies by enabling them to work in one environment and one interface with single sign-on to all of the programs they use to work with clients, manage investments and automatically update financial plans.
Data from one application such as a CRM can now be automatically updated at TDAI in Veo One, as well as other applications in a bi-directional manner, saving advisors time, improving accuracy and delivering needed efficiencies.
New Vendor Developments
From the technology vendor side, top news coming out of the Veo Village included SS&C Advent's new partnership with HedgeCoVest to provide their SMArt Xchange (SMArtX) exclusively to SS&C's client base of advisors using Black Diamond.
