Orion Launches New Client Portal for Advisors

News July 28, 2020 at 05:11 PM
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headshot of Orion Advisor Services CEO Eric Clarke Orion Advisor Services CEO Eric Clarke.

Orion Advisor Solutions has unveiled a new Orion Client Portal, calling it a "single destination for investors to reach their advisors and control their entire financial landscape."

The platform provider also announced the portal's integration with the Apex Clearing digital custody and clearing engine, which it says meets the rising demand for "one-stop, go anywhere access" to an investor's full financial picture.

Investors can now interact with their financial plans and track their investment performance with no need to shuttle back and forth between "clashing portals," Orion explained in a press release.

The news comes a month after Orion, which supports some 2,000 advisory firms with $1 trillion in assets under administration, said it is merging with investment manager Brinker Capital to form a firm with some $40 billion in managed assets. 

As Orion evolved beyond its roots as a portfolio management technology provider, the firm saw a clear need for a new standard in investor-advisor engagement — made all the more urgent by the demands of remote work, according to Orion founder and CEO Eric Clarke.

"We built our legacy portal to support our core mission at the time," Clarke said in a statement. "It is still a robust, white-labeled solution for investors to see their key portfolio and investment information."

Through the firm's purchase of Advizr's planning tools and user interface, it came to see that its mission "had expanded to encompass a more complete fiduciary process," he explained. "A year later, we're proud to reveal a new portal that brings together everything an investor needs and expects from their advisor."

Looking Ahead

Orion plans to continue offering many of the same features in its legacy portal, which grants investor access to Orion's investment management solutions, including performance reports, balance sheets and details on portfolio accounts.

The new Orion Client Portal, though, adds a next-generation user interface, access to financial planning tools, account aggregation, custodial services, a digital vault of key documents and other expanded features. The combination of all these features "creates a uniquely powerful relationship-building tool for advisors," according to the firm.

Across the industry, these functions tend to be "scattered across multiple portals with cluttered interfaces and hard-to-find resources. The status quo of multiple portals contributes to low engagement and login fatigue, with overall portal adoption barely reaching 10-12%" in financial services, it explained.

"One of the biggest advantages advisors can bring to the marketplace right now is a coordinated access point for a client's entire financial and investment landscape," according to Hussain Zaidi, Orion's chief strategy officer. 

During the height of 2020's market volatility, for instance, Orion saw a 20% increase in portal logins.

"The new Orion Client Portal connects and unifies every stage of the advisor-client relationship: building trust and transparency with prospects, expressing investors' goals through financial planning, and forging a clear link between those goals and individualized investment strategies," Zaidi added.

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