Quiet phase over, Rockefeller firm readies itself for global marketing push. Rockit Solutions, an eight-year-old investment-data aggregator and performance-report provider to ultra-high-wealth families, has a new client in Wells Fargo Family Office Group. The win comes as the newly re-branded Rockit rolls out a business-development initiative in the U.S., and readies itself to provide back-office technologies to family offices the world over.

"Until now we've been fairly quiet about it, but we have the platform to serve the market and we're starting to expand and make our message public," Rockit's CEO Roy King says of the firm's nascent marketing efforts.

Late last year, as a first step in this push, New York-based Rockit hired Michael Collins as its chief marketing officer. Like King, who joined Rockit about seven months earlier, Collins came to Rockit from business-process and human-resources outsourcer and Gevity HR.

AKA

More recently Rockit set the stage for its marketing initiative by going back, more or less, to its old name.

Rockit was launched under the name RockIT in 2000 as a software offering of the multifamily office Rockefeller & Company, now its sister firm under the holding company Rockefeller Financial Services. RockIT, originally pronounced as "rock-eye-tee," stood for "Rockefeller Information Technology."

In 2006, the RockIT group of Rockefeller & Company became a wholly-owned affiliate under the name Integrated Wealth Services (IWS). It cast the brand change as an effort to distinguish the firm from its underlying technology by using a more descriptive name.

But the IWS moniker never stuck. Two months ago the firm became "Rockit Solutions" -- the first word now pronounced as "rocket" -- with "Integrated Wealth Services" featured as a tagline.

Rockit's efforts to get its business-development team and branding in order as a prelude to marketing its services more aggressively seems well timed.

Last year the world's population of individuals with at least $30 million in financial assets -- the "ultra high net worth" -- was 103,300, according to the latest edition of Capgemini's and Merrill Lynch's annual World Wealth Report. Around 40% of them were in the U.S. and Canada, roughly a quarter were in Europe and another fifth or so of the total were in Asia.

Spreadsheets

But Rockit focuses on an elite sub-set of the "ultra" universe: families with at least $100 million in total assets and the single- and multi-family offices that serve them.

There's a longstanding debate about what constitutes a "true" family office, and, as a result, how many of them there are. According to one estimate, there are about 4,000 in the U.S. providing integrated planning, investment monitoring and control functions, and maybe 7,000 the world over.

Fortunately for Rockit, most family offices -- the non-commercial ones especially -- are unhappy with their performance-reporting procedures and outcomes, according to a 2008 survey of single-family office executives by Family Office Metrics, a New York-based technology consultancy to ultra-wealthy families.

This unhappiness may be traceable to the family-office staffer's reliance on manual-input spreadsheet software as aids to everything from financial planning and investment analytics to client reporting and portfolio accounting.

In a survey of its own clients' spreadsheets, the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 90% of them had significant data-entry errors; a rate of unreliability that can waste time and lead to costly false-premise conclusions that -- in the context of high-wealth management -- can skew a family's investment and planning decisions.

Multiples

In fact Wells Fargo Family Office Group, a unit of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo's Wealth Management Group that manages approximately $7 billion for 70 mainly U.S.-based families, opted for Rockit after a year-long search, primarily because it wanted to shed as much light as possible on its clients' holdings -- and be in a position add value along those lines by assisting them with strategic asset allocation, market-driven tactical approaches and overlay functions like tax harvesting and overall optimization.

"Our clients are multiple-household, multiple-generation, multiple-custodian families that need clarity and comprehensive information to make decisions," says Michael Cole, national director of Wells Fargo Family Wealth Group. "Rockit puts us in a position to help families make these decisions and it shows clients that we're thinking about them in truly global terms."

Some technology vendors offer piecemeal approaches to family-office back-office functionality, but most of them aren't up to the task of keeping track of ultra-affluent families' holdings -- mainly because they can't provide an adequately updated and sufficiently normalized records of assets that are "held away" from primary custodians.

Very few

"In this market segment -- where we're working every day -- it's typical for the [primary wealth-management] provider to have [only] 25% to 50% of the assets under custody," says Cole. "By letting us see assets held at four different firms -- and often more than that -- Rockit gives us a much broader view of the client and helps us give the client better advice."

In the search that led it to Rockit, Wells Fargo Family Wealth Group set out to find an inclusive aggregation, normalization and performance-reporting platform that was designed for -- and actually used by -- families in the $100-million-in-assets-plus bracket to replace a system it had cobbled together internally using third-party components.

In the end, the multifamily office found "shockingly few" alternatives to Rockit, says Cole. "We found a lot of terrific firms aimed mostly at the private-banking space, but few -- you could count them on one hand -- that are dedicated to the space we're in and that also stick to their mandate."

Cole declines to name any of the other data aggregators he and his colleagues at Wells Fargo Family Wealth Group vetted.

Similarly, King can't be persuaded to discuss Rockit's rivals.

But -- in addition to launching a business-development push just as its target market starts, however slowly, to appreciate the value of its services -- Rockit has to be watching events at Fidelity Investment's Family Office Services group with interest.

Boston-based Fidelity's family-office-support unit -- arguably Rockit's primary potential competitor -- has seen several changes of management over the past year and a wave of recent departures. The problem seems to be that the group -- five years and dozens of beta tests into the process -- has been unable to provide high-end data-aggregation technology that's both adequate to the task and sufficiently cost-effective to make inroads in the marketplace.

SocGen

A clearer-cut source of optimism at Rockit is the benefits it sees as a result of a recent infusion of capital from Societe Generale (SocGen), a Paris-based banking giant that recently took a 37% stake in its parent company Rockefeller Financial Services.

"We're excited about SocGen because it give us growth capital to keep our technology platform best of class," says King.

In addition, SocGen's presence as a wealth manager in Europe and Asia -- though one that tends to play downstream from the Rockefeller companies -- could help Rockit gain significant market share in those regions.

To that end, Rockit is working to roll out global-market versions of its platform in 2010, according to King.

Rockit won't say how many clients it has or what its assets under administration are these days. (The latest figure from Rockit, now nearly 10 months old, is $30 billion in assets under administration.)

Other than saying it provides administrative services to Rockefeller & Company as well as Wells Fargo's family-office group, Rockit will only add that its "client base is made up of [single-family offices] and [multifamily offices]" in addition to "many clients that are endowments, hedge funds, financial institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals."

Rockit, which is in the process of moving the bulk of its operations from New York to Stanford, Conn., has a staff of about 100. -FWR

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