The Fiduciary Standard states that wealth managers should always act in the best interests of their clients and do everything they can to have positive and accurate communications. One of the most obvious ways to do that is to provide reports that engage and inform the client in a detailed and accurate way.

When clients receive reporting that addresses their own investing goals, rather than generic portfolio performance against arbitrary indices, they’re much more likely to feel like their wealth manager is attentive to their needs. However, producing custom reports has two inherent problems:
1. Collecting all of the necessary data points needed for a specific, goals-based report.
2. Designing a custom goals-based report for each client in the timeframe that suits his or her needs.

Data Collection

Wealth management firms share a common issue, no matter their size or location: the collection of data for reporting purposes is a manual undertaking that takes time and is fraught with the potential for human error. Every firm uses several systems to serve its clients—an accounting system, a trading platform, a reporting system, and the firm’s internal management platform for compliance and regulatory reporting needs. Depending on the firm, there are other systems too.

Since all of these systems are the products of unrelated service providers, they all handle information in different ways. For example, login information is unique to each system. They each handle and deliver data in different formats. With such disparate and individual systems, collecting and aggregating the data points for reports becomes a time-consuming pursuit. That might not seem like such a bad thing until one realizes that the number of clients that will receive reports multiplies the time used to collect all these data points.

Producing Custom Reports

Once the data has been collected, normalized, and checked for errors, producing reports is the next step in the process. Most of the information providers in our industry deliver their information in a rigid way in order to address their own compliance guidelines. That makes it difficult to change the way information comes to a wealth manager trying to generate reports.

This leaves the wealth manager with a conundrum: take on the entire task of designing and providing reports in a way that is custom and unique, but still conforms to their own compliance concerns, or reduce the “custom” aspect of reporting, and help the client adjust to getting their reports in a less custom format.

Managers on the pathway to becoming true stewards of their clients’ wealth would certainly prefer to have the ability to produce a truly custom report for each client that provides goals-oriented information that is engaging and accurate.

OnPoint Reports

First Rate’s CORE solution addresses custom reporting concerns for any wealth management firm in a holistic web-based console. As data is received, it is pushed into a performance engine that performs automatic load processes, calculates performance returns and executes sophisticated, systematic audits. All the headaches associated with different logins, data formats, accessibility, normalization, and human error are addressed in an easy and automated process. Data is simply available for use when it’s needed, and in a format that is usable.
Once the data is collected and available, CORE’s OnPoint Reports module allows any user to generate reports. A wealth steward can build the story he or she wants to tell, according to the needs of their investor client. Each report can show various periods, numerous goals, and track results against both stated individual goals and any other indices or benchmarks that are desirable.

Once the report is completed, it can be stored and generated at any time in the future, on the schedule set by the manager and the client together. This is important—particularly when there are a number of individual clients.

Adverse market events can be dealt with easily. Imagine being able to come into the office after an overnight market event, knowing that clients will soon be on the phone wanting accurate information. CORE’s automated reporting features allow managers to be proactive and reach out to affected clients with fresh reports showing any effects of overnight’s activity.

First Rate CORE is the best application for secure data handling and custom, real-time reporting solutions. We’ve taken great care to make sure that all aspects of operating in our industry are managed in a way that makes business sense to our clients and serves the investor with results that are engaging and insightful.