LPL Financial has started adding separately managed accounts (SMAs) to Model Wealth Portfolios (MWP), its premier advisory platform. This means advisors can combine multiple investment types in one account, which the company disclosed Thursday during its Focus 2021 conference.
With this enhancement, MWP will become a unified managed account platform, giving advisors the flexibility to design portfolios in various different ways to tailor them for each client's individual needs, according to the company.
LPL made some SMAs available on the MWP platform last week, Robert Pettman, executive vice president of Wealth Management Solutions at LPL Financial, told ThinkAdvisor Thursday.
"We're currently testing them" with advisors who already use SMAs and "we'll be rolling them out to advisors throughout the rest of this year," he said, adding, "We'll do it in waves and all advisors will have access by year-end." The company will then continue to "invest and increase our capabilities there."
The SMA plan, Pettman said, is "attached to" LPL's plans to spend more than $1.3 billion this year on investments in key areas such as technology and other efforts to support advisor growth, which were announced one day earlier, on the first day of Focus.
LPL is "investing a considerable amount in its advisory platforms," he said, noting the firm already made several announcements about platform enhancements this year ahead of the conference.
LPL earlier this year introduced Firm Sleeve, its proprietary investment management solution that it said in June had already surpassed $3.4 billion in assets, demonstrating the value of a personalized investment management solution. Built within LPL's centrally managed MWP platform, Firm Sleeve delivers scalable, digital and flexible solutions for large firms, RIAs and institutions.
The combination of Firm Sleeve and Advisor Sleeve, the technology solution LPL introduced in 2019 that was designed to help advisors gain scale and efficiency in their advisory practices while expanding upon the functionality that LPL can deliver as it enhances its wealth management platform for the future, recently reached $9.1 billion in assets, Pettman noted.
