Orion Advisor Services announced on Wednesday the launch of Catalyst, a new technology and marketing offering for turnkey asset management programs. The tool is designed to help TAMPs give advisors a seamless onboarding tool for clients, integrated with powerful back-office features from each of the providers.
Orion teamed up with AdvisoryWorld, a portfolio modeling and proposal generator, and Mineral Interactive, a digital strategy and design firm, to create the new platform.
Mineral will provide TAMPs who use the platform with a customizable user interface, digital strategy and messaging support, branding guidelines and a logo. AdvisoryWorld will provide lead acquisition and portfolio modeling support, as well as risk- and goals-based proposal generation. Unified managed account maintenance, new account opening and back office services will come from Orion.
"All of us have worked very closely with TAMPs for a long time," Michael Wilson, COO and president of AdvisoryWorld, told ThinkAdvisor on Monday. "What we've found over the years is just about all these implementations with TAMPs in particular require a certain level of customization, some bespoke services, whether it's customizing some user experience to manage workloads specific to the TAMP, or modifying the output to find consistency with all the different collateral that these organizations put out."
Instead of addressing these disparate needs separately, the three firms decided to "wrap a bundle around the three of us that allows us to go into opportunities together working with TAMPs and in a rapid manner put together a customized solution."
The solutions created with Catalyst can be used with any other technology platform, including those from providers other than Orion, AdvisoryWorld or Mineral. "However," Wilson noted, "by using the three of us together, you know as a TAMP that you will get a system that not only works in an integrated manner from Day 1, but you also get a group of companies from a service and support perspective that are very familiar with one another and play really well together."
Randy Lambert, president of Orion, noted that all TAMPs have their own story and methodology. He credited Mineral's Jud Mackrill for his ability "to pull that out of them and create a digital message for them."
