Orion Adds Behavioral Finance to Financial Planning Platform: Tech Roundup

What You Need to Know

Orion’s new tool helps advisors keep their clients calm during market volatility and improves financial outcomes.
Envestnet announces several spring updates that enhance its platform.
Snappy Kraken acquired industry website builder and existing integration partner Advisor Website.

Orion Advisor Solutions added behavioral finance to its financial planning technology platform, the company said.

The firm’s new, goals-based investing approach, called “Protect, Live, Dream,” utilizes “mental accounting to help clients achieve a sense of calm and security while simultaneously striving to reach their dreams,” according to Orion.

While developing Protect, Live, Dream, “we aimed to provide advisors with a tool that helps keep their clients calm during market volatility, improves their client’s financial outcomes, and, ultimately, guides their clients to better financial planning habits,” Dr. Daniel Crosby, chief behavioral officer at Orion, said Monday in a statement.

Clients can join their advisors in crafting personalized plans that better serve their short- and long-term financial goals, the company said.

Separately, Orion said it’s backing an “industry-wide effort to advocate for the adoption of real-time data sharing technology to improve data accessibility and transparency for independent advisors.”

As part of the initiative, Orion said it’s using Amazon Redshift cloud-based data warehousing technologies from Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Redshift allows Orion to enhance the speed, performance and scalability of its data processing solutions without requiring a large infrastructure investment, Orion said.

Orion also tweeted Wednesday that it’s hiring. “Work from anywhere in the country, keep wearing what you want, and we’ll give you the tools and ‘the attire’ to succeed. Check out our careers page to explore your next best opportunity here: https://fal.cn/3okeG”

Envestnet Adds Tax Management, Sustainable Investing Features

Ahead of its Envestnet Advisor Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina, May 11-12, the company announced it made several technology updates throughout its ecosystem.

The enhancements were “designed to meet and exceed the evolving technology and investing needs of financial advisors and their clients,” and were a part of a series of spring releases including investment products, web-based planning solutions, and an optimized advisor and client experience, Envestnet said.

The company will unveil “additional innovations as part of our roadmap” at the Advisor Summit, according to Molly Weiss, Head of Product for Envestnet Wealth.

New Envestnet features includes next-generation proposal workflow that it said is “driven by feedback from advisors, who can now access” several capabilities within proposals for new investment products, it said.

The new features include Fund Strategist Tax Management, allowing advisors to outsource and automate tax management on either third-party manager or proprietary home office fund strategist portfolio accounts at scale and personalized to their individual clients’ tax situations and investment goals.

Also new are sustainable investing strategies and overlays that Orion said “enable advisors to incorporate institutional-quality and customized sustainable investment approaches into client portfolios.”

Rounding out the new features are: Private Wealth Consulting, enhanced account setup features including more flexible dollar cost average settings and account-level security restrictions, and updated performance reports.

Meanwhile, Envestnet | Tamarac updates for spring include: Streamlined navigation for Unified Managed Accounts in the client portal and in the Reporting solution; compliance tools to support advisors’ Form ADV and 13F reporting; enhanced reporting capabilities; and continued usability enhancements for the new modernized trading experience with simplified Rebalancing workflow.

Envestnet | MoneyGuide also completed a new integration with Special Needs Map, a web-based planning tool, to help estimate how much money clients may want to leave a child with special needs after they pass, Envestnet said.

Snappy Kraken Buys Advisor Websites

Snappy Kraken acquired industry website builder and existing integration partner Advisor Websites to “create a holistic solution for websites, branding and digital marketing,” it said Tuesday.