Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic webinar hosted here by Orion Advisor Technology. My name is Adam Palmer, VP of Strategic Product development, overseeing Orion's performance reporting on screen, digital experience as as well as our integration strategy and our new. Really exciting product line around data sharing and data streaming, which we'll get into here during the webinar. Today with me I have Tim Welch who is the President, CEO and founder of Nexus Strategy and in a fantastic partner to Orion where today he is going to speak to you about industry trends, scale and efficiency around the wealth management industry and how to achieve I would say the the the most integrated experience to power your business. Tim, thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much Adam for that kind introduction. It's been great to work with the team here. Try and do some original research and we actually talked to some advisors that are on the platform and using some of these tools and applications as well as you know going back in time and really bringing back the classic issue of technology integration and you know why advisors are moving from system to system. So why don't we just dig into the next slide and kick this off with some of the content and here's some great stats. These are recent from investment news. You know, this is again you know goes back a number of years. Maybe even a decade in terms of the integration problem, you know, if you think about an advisor who started their business, they have a billion dollars now. They probably started their business, you know, 20 years ago on a PC running, you know, desktop software. And as we've evolved, as technology evolved, you know, advisors have found different tools and aspects. Innovation has happened and it's really been more of a cobbling together, if you will, of the various systems and tools to run a wealth management business. And there you can see why you know over half, 57%. Say that this integration problem is A is a real issue because there have been some attempts at it, API and so forth, but it still seems to break down, still seems to, you know, create manual workarounds and interrupt your workflows in your process. And further study is, you know, 70% say that that's a problem. So let's get to the whole point of this whole webinar. The swivel chair advisor, you know, what a great concept. It's such a great mental image of you're over here on one side, typing into the system and then all of a sudden you have to move over here so you can actually send the. The content is somewhere else or another system and you have to move over and type the same data again and in order to get a workflow done. I'm sure this is a very common experience for many advisors and that's that's the challenge getting back to that the best in breed sort of. We've cobbled together our tech stacks over the years and now we are sort of in this conundrum of being able, unable to have just an automated flow and there's really a lot of angst around that against back to our stats and studies. So let's move on to the next slide and we can sort of see where. Uh, this is coming from and you know, a lot of it has to do with the proliferation of systems. You know, if you look at the Michael Kitsis logo map or here you see that in Joel Breckenstein T3 study, they looked at over 800 products. That's a ton of systems for advisors to evaluate to navigate and bring those together. So despite this pain point of all these different systems and integrations that sometimes work, sometimes don't, or there may be just no very thin integration, single sign on. We're seeing that only 20%, one fifth of the industry. Has actually migrated towards a unified system. So obviously I think we see that people want that, but again even that aspect, 1/3 of the many of them are also using third party solutions to supplement that system and to put a fine point on it. You know the other part of the survey that we looked at, a typical firm uses 5 vendors which is a lot and a third of them looking to add more. So it's not like this problem is going to go away. We definitely see that integration multiple systems in order to run the business. As you want. I think that's also sort of a, you know, a corollary to how the independent space is. That the beauty of it is you can access some fantastic tech to deliver the client experience that you want to deliver. However, there does bring up issues of scale, of reliability, of errors, of workflow interruptions, and So what is needed here is really a finer approach towards automation. And really what we're trying to get at, and I love this idea of the Holy Grail. You know, we've all been pursuing this. I think, you know, TD Ameritrade with their bail one aspect, multiple custodians have taken a crack at this in terms of integration. The key aspect is really the interoperability of systems. And by that we mean that they all work together, that the workflows are unified. You're in one experience. You're not swivel chairing back and forth. And the experience you get really relies on standardized data and I think that's at the heart of the matter here. We're going to talk about later and Adam is going to come back and give us some great insight on data, data management. But in order to actually put all these systems to work multiple function, you definitely need to have that environment work together only if the data is unified, updated and source from one place across systems. And that's a challenge for many firms, you know, a lot of firms at the large size, you know we're talking, you know. The 2030 billion and above, they may have a data warehouse, the central location for all the data, but for the most advisors they don't and are now suffering from that lack of opportunity. However, the good news is that things are changing, technology is improving and we're going to be able to talk about in the next slide here. So we talked about our API driven world. That is a great attempt at bringing together third party applications. You know, application program interface. You know they've got rules and business rules that say hey, if, if this, then that move this shared source, this household ID from here, move this account number from here to here. They're all working pretty much in a one way space because every system has their own API and we have multiple API for multiple systems. All of a sudden it comes exponential. The number of applications that need to work together and what we see oftentimes are drop offs and what we mean by that. Is that if somebody changes an API or changes the field or even moves a column from left to right or it just becomes a challenge because the data does not then flow, the API connection breaks and all of a sudden the data that's supposed to flow from one system to the other. For example from your CRM into your financial planning systems with the clients data or your performance reporting system with the level of the accounts and the assets from the custodian, it doesn't show up or shows up incorrectly and you have to move back and then correct that and then move on to your next step in your work. That is a real challenge. Even though we do have somewhat of a solution and API still are extremely valuable. There is an issue when those drop offs happen and again we go back to our civil chair. We have to move from system to system to be able to do that, copy and paste data and move on to the next thing. And the problem is often the fact that we have errors. It's not efficient. You can't scale. So if all of a sudden you bring on 10 new clients, you have to bring on somebody in the back office to help, you know, work on all these systems. Do the performance reporting every quarter, update the financial plans, make sure the CRM is correct, ensure that the download from custodian are happening on a regular basis. There's just so much more back office inefficiencies when you're using multiple systems. And the technology stack that you created and the other issue here is that advisors are wonderful people. We know that to be true. They're awesome business owners. They're great with clients. They do such wonderful things, but maybe we're not all the best IT department and that's also an issue for why, you know, these drop offs happen and the API's that have been attempted resolution haven't always worked. And the research that we've done with advisors and talking to the various providers really resonates this fact that yes, we all have the same vision, we're all aligned. I'm able to create an environment where this all works together seamlessly. The technology that we're working with right now just doesn't make it easy and simple to do. So let's take a look at ways we can take a look at this on the next slide. So the fabulous news is that the industry continues to innovate. We continue to see new and better ways to bring things together and new approaches to software design development that simply just weren't available a few years ago. And that's really, you know, the the rise of what we call cloud computing or cloud native. Where you have the data, you have the application, you have the business rules, you have the calculations, you have the user interface, all of that is combined into one environment. And that's the beauty of the cloud, being able to do that. And of course, in order to make this all work, you have to have one central warehouse for all the data. And that's something we haven't had in the past and that's why we're working with API, sending data back and forth and we just didn't have a way to rationalize that. But ultimately to make this work, data warehouses, we'll talk about micro services in a second. This is the fundamental core of what the platforms need, what advisors need and are able to leverage today. This is real time now can really make that operation seamless, automated and it flows through all your systems. It's really the technology Nirvana that we're talking about and it's just a new development approach. As I mentioned, simply wasn't available until platforms like Amazon Web Services came around and redshift technologies to have these warehouses that can. Use them as a strategic approach to be able to design your client experience, design the systems that would deliver on that, and then have one place for the data to reside that is, you know, standardized and works automatically. You don't have to update, you eliminate those manual interventions. You don't have those errors of inefficiency more and you can finally bring scale to the business and this is really exciting. It's it's brand new folks have been working on it for a couple of years now, but it ultimately now it's ready for the wealth management space and we're very excited to talk about it. On the next slide we'll get into the other aspect of this, which is the micro services and of course you know we have this opportunity. There's a great video of our friend swilling here to be able to go back to, you know, bringing all these. Applications into one simplified unified experience. And I mentioned micro services and that's really the way ability to bring, you know, multiple services into one application to stop the swivel here. And if you think about that, the example we like to use is like an Uber or Lyft. You know, think about all the things you're accessing on your mobile phone from the GPS that knows where you are, where the driver is to the credit card database so you can provide payment to the feedback mechanism. 5 stars always give five stars to also the user interface. So on a mobile phone, none of this was available again without this type of cloud native development computing. And why I'm very excited to talk about the Amazon red shift with my good friend Adam, who's going to join us back now and talk about somehow how all this data works together and what Orion's doing to make this all in one seamless process. So, so, Adam, you know, when you guys, when you have looked at this problem that you were trying to solve, what was sort of the first things you did, how did you end up with them Amazon as a solution and what sort of your thought process? Yeah. So thanks Tim and and what I what I would say is the the the data sharing you know strategy kind of fell into our laps a little bit. But really the the problems that Orion was really trying to solve initially with partnering with a WS and and specifically Redshift was was really just our our move to the cloud, right. Cloud enablement across the industry is a very popular topic and and Orion is is going through that maturation process or that that transition from an on Prem. Data infrastructure to a cloud based solution across all of our different product lines. And we chose Red Shift as a data analytics warehouse to really power our reporting experience. So you know our core performance calculation our our activity calculation. So when a when a when a advisor needs, needs an insight on a particular investor and wanting to see you know call it their one year, three-year, five year performance returns really just using redshift as a data warehouse technology that that houses all these this transactional data. To to calculate or or serve the advisor in that capacity really the bread, the bread and butter of Orion for the last 20 years. But what what came with that opportunity is partnering with Red Shift as a product in a WS, as a, as a, as a business. On really their their road map and started talking about some of our problems that we have in our industry specifically and selfishly to the Orion infrastructure. One of those items being scale as it relates to data delivery. As as advisors get larger they require more data and they require more we'll call it in house or or ad hoc or or just in time insights. And so they pull data from all these different sources and one of the things that we saw API. Don't scale right to pulling millions of rows of transactions flat files. While they do scale, they're immediately stale when that data is delivered, and so red shift started working on. Hey, technology feature if you will, of their particular managed storage that allows you to take cluster to cluster and share that data in real time. You know that has application for your internal businesses. If you have two different teams running two different WS accounts, it has external application. If you have you know a producer like Orion and a consumer like an RCA out there that that needs access to this data, you can connect those two clusters being a WS redshift. In power real time data from from 1 from 1 producer to a consumer and that's that's really what that's really what drew us to this opportunity and and why we are so invested because it scales, it makes advisors more efficient and it gives advisors access to to real time data. What's the next step? How are you going to bring like the red tail environment together, your planning tools, your risk tolerance, you've got all these great components and I think you know from the earlier part of the webinar we saw. But the, the, the challenge to bring it all to 1 unified ecosystem is, is really the opportunity as well. So what, what's sort of the the next steps we'll see from you guys as you, you dig into this? Yeah, that's a that's a great question and and one that is is definitely top of mind for us and and So what we are what we are doing at Orion is we are going through this you know. Very difficult but very, very necessary process where we are creating data governance and taxonomy guardrails around the different business lines that we've acquired throughout the years and and really bringing a centralized model to how we go about storing or or sharing data across a different product lines. So one of the things that we are we are actively doing and you know in starting with like the concept of a prospect, right. So because you have red tail that has the contact record, you have the, you know the our wealth management. Out of the business that has prospect prospecting tools with with campaigns and marketer then you have our Orion Risk intelligence formerly known as Hidden Levers that does a lot of the the proposal generation and and analytics on on regression analysis on models. Well we're we're creating what we call and it's it's no fancy word, right but centralized microservices where these tables sit in the middle of of our ecosystem that have in store all of the data. In a normalized fashion that then all of the different product lines tap into. So we're all speaking the same language. So if you have a model that you're managing in Eclipse communities, hidden risk intelligence in in having that flow into Orion Connect for your performance reporting, that model data is all speaking the same language that has the same attributes, the same allocation and just creates scale across, you know, specifically the Orion business, but with that scale and the Orion. Business comes the, I would say opportunity for business growth on the RA side because we're taking care of a lot of that nuance on their behalf. That's fantastic Adam. Thanks for that explanation, really helpful. So you know I've heard that you know Eric Clark kind of considers Ryan like a most in one system, but if I have a third party application that I really like, is that able to be plugged in here the API still work or what sort of the thought process there? Yeah that that's a great question Tim and and and really you know dives into what our strategy is moving forward here at Orion. You know it's it's no surprise to anyone right that Orion still has a a build buyer partner mentality. Obviously we've built a lot of technology in house we've we've acquired a lot of new technology out there in the marketplace but the the nature of Orion's open architecture business strategy is not changing I would say so that partner. That partner strategy is still very much a key element of our go forward strategy where integration is paramount you know and and really it's becoming table stakes, right. I know we we had a conversation Tim last week about integration and and how it powers our industry and that's where that will not change Orion's go forward strategy right where we have the data sharing for, for massive application of of data being passed through in real time our API. Architecture, if anything we are opening that up further, right. So like some of the technologies that we've acquired over the years, they did not have an open API architecture as more Ala carte to the use case. We're actually bringing those API's from say risk intelligence and Orion planning into our API suite for further integration opportunity. And then we also will still have the legacy data transmission where where applicable for flat files, but but where where I would love to see Orion get from an integration standpoint. Right is is evangelizing this type of technology. I, I want the third party vendors out there that that are still independent or or private equity back that we want to partner with to integrate with us in this capacity whether we are the producer or they are the producer because we know that one. We're not going to build every piece of technology out there to we're not going to buy you know and create, create a monopoly in our industry, buy everything and and to be honest with you startups and and other technologies. Out there still have a huge place in in our industry and our building innovative solutions that we want to partner with. So as far as like our go forward strategy, it's it's the same strategy as it's always been. We just have this new integration opportunity or technology that will will better facilitate integration in my opinion. Great. One more question for you. You know, this sounds like an awesome dream and we've all been chasing this, you know, a vision for years and years and years. I'm. So what are some of the benefits that advisors are going to get once you know this gets rolling? What are the top two or three things you think advisor will be able to drive their business forward with? Yeah. You know where where I think a lot of this comes into play is, is scale specifically to the operations team and scale to the advisors having access to data that helps. The clients relationship, right. So when when I when I say that what I think of in in years years of experience is the operational overhead that are is that that is that RA around data management right. It's it's extremely labor intensive in some cases especially you know in the alternative space right where you have illiquid investments you have lagging statements you have you know data mess everywhere if you will. Now that said what this type of technology does is gives us the opportunity to. Stabilize and streamline those processes. So say for instance you know the pie in the sky right to to accomplish this and and really get our industry on board is taking data in real time when the trade is executed at the custodian into a portfolio accounting system like Orion to do all of your performance calculations, all of your fee billing, your trading, things of that nature back to the end advisor that then can either you know based on their position at the at the firm either grow new assets make new relationships because they're not worried about. Data normalization and data quality or the operations team that's facilitating account opening of you know fee schedule assignment, model assignment, trading, all of those things, all of those processes become streamlined through this type of technology. And that's really where I see our industry starting to win out, where it's, I would say it's it's on par if not better than other technological experiences that end investors have in their day-to-day life. You know, the fact that you you can get. On Amazon or or or you know change all of your settings or your preferences on Netflix or you know request a car in real time from from Uber. Those are the types of things that investors should come to expect with their portfolio management and that's where we need to deliver with you know these these I would say this evolution of of technology that we have. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. I think we covered a lot of ground. It was great to share this original research with you and get insight from a product development software engineer who's. On the forefront of bringing us all together, if you do have questions, go ahead and submit them in. If you want to learn more, we have a bunch of links there for access to other assets that you can learn again. And of course if you want to share this with some of your colleagues, you'll get a link in a in a in the near future to watch an on demand recording of this. So we can hope you can only share it through cross organization. So again thank you for joining us today. We look forward to seeing you next time. _1732337670001