Morgan Stanley launched an investing analytics and reporting application designed to help all Morgan Stanley Wealth Management clients further integrate social and environmental objectives into their investments.
It provides Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors with suggestions for investment solutions that could better align clients' portfolios over time with the impact preferences that matter most to them.
"Increasingly, our clients and Financial Advisors are looking for data-driven insights to inform their investment decisions," said Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in a statement.
The Morgan Stanley Impact Quotient (Morgan Stanley IQ) is available at no extra cost for the firm's clients through its 3D advisor desktop application and is built into the firm's client reporting system, Matt Slovik, head of Global Sustainable Finance at Morgan Stanley, told ThinkAdvisor.
The application provides customized insights into users' current investment holdings and allows them to consider sustainability and impact goals through a comprehensive framework to identify and prioritize more than 100 social and environmental impact preferences. Then through "the insights of multiple third-party data sources and proprietary Morgan Stanley analytics" the app can instantly assess the alignment of investments with those preferences," the company said in its announcement.
AdvicePay Launches New Fee Calculator for Advisors
AdvicePay, the billing and payments platform developed by Michael Kitces and Alan Moore who co-founded the XY Planning Network, has added a fee calculator for financial advisors designed to serve as an efficiency, productivity and compliance tool for fee-for-service payments.
The new AdvicePay Fee Calculator "simply and easily calculates the amount of fees that are due based on various client-fee schedules and scenarios, while automatically creating accompanying invoices for compliance purposes and to implement the actual billing process," the company said in its announcement.
As the fee-for-service business model gains momentum, more advisors are working with clients by directly charging for their advice outside of or alongside an asset management fee for portfolio management or a commission for product implementation, from monthly subscription fees to income-and-net-worth retainer fees and more, the company said.
"The challenge of the fee-for-service model is that for the first time ever, advisors are entirely on their own to determine what fee to charge in the first place," Kitces said in a statement.
"The significance of AdvicePay's Fee Calculator isn't just that it is critical from a workflow automation perspective to standardize the fees that advisory firms charge across the business, but it will also provide a visual means for advisors to show and discuss how they set their fees with clients, and to justify and validate why the advisor is charging the fee that they do for the value they provide," he said.
Addepar Expands its Wealth Management Platform for RIAs
Addepar expanded its wealth management platform by integrating with three major financial planning software providers: eMoney Advisor, Envestnet MoneyGuide Pro and Libretto.
The integrations give users the ability to "leverage the power of Addepar's data network, providing a single point of access to hundreds of aggregated, normalized and reconciled custodian feeds, along with offline holdings such as alternative investments and real estate, directly within" those software applications, Addepar said in its announcement.
With the new integration, eMoney users can access Addepar reports directly in the eMoney File Vault, allowing advisors to give their clients "more holistic insight without transitioning between two systems," Addepar said. Users can also seamlessly transition between eMoney and Addepar for efficient access to financial plans and portfolio performance data.
MoneyGuide users, meanwhile, can achieve consistency across Addepar and MoneyGuide workflows, ensuring that data presented in a financial plan matches the values in client reports. Users can also "search, access and link Addepar households in real-time via MoneyGuide," Addepar said.
Libretto users can deliver household data from Addepar "with the click of a button, enabling powerful financial strategy tools including: priorities-based planning, liability-driven asset allocation, factor-level portfolio construction, asset location, product fulfillment, trade directives, wealth management directives and comprehensive reporting," Addepar said.
