Advisorport offers unified managed account that gives advisors more control. Advisorport, PFPC's third-party investment platform provider, is out with a new unified managed account (UMA) that's intended to give advisors more flexibility in terms of asset allocation and manager selection than most other UMAs on the market today.

"This is a significant step forward for our sponsors," says A.J. Harper, Advisorport's president.

UMAs are fee-based, single-CUSIP investment products that, generally speaking, feature combinations of separately managed accounts (SMAs), mutual funds and ETFs. An overlay manager -- in this case Advisorport (using technology from CheckFree Investment Services ' Upstream Technologies unit) -- takes care of account-level rebalancing, restrictions, cash flows, and, where relevant, tax-liability management.

The difference

Most UMAs are pre-packaged. They feature fixed asset allocations and fixed managers and funds. Using these products the best an advisor can hope to do in terms of customization is match clients with UMAs that are roughly suited to the clients' individual risk-and-return profiles.

Advisorport's new product gives the advisor discretion to establish the UMA's asset allocation within suitability parameters set by the sponsor, select the blend of investment vehicles and populate it with styles of his choosing. Subsequently, the advisor can tweak these aspects to suit the client's changing circumstances and requirements.

Jean Sullivan of Dover Financial Research, a Boston-based consulting firm, says investment-product sponsors are developing "more flexible" UMAs in a bid to give intermediaries more choices for investors.

Morgan Stanley launched a similar-sounding UMA about a year ago. Advisorport says it's the first non-wirehouse to offer one.

Though definitions vary from firm to firm -- what one sponsor calls a UMA would be a multiple-discipline account (MDA) to another -- UMA assets under management could hit the $45-billion mark by the end of this year, according to Sullivan. That's up from around $31 billion at the end of 2006 and $19 billion at the end of 2005. (MDAs, which feature different SMA equity-style sleeves from one or more managers, and UMAs accounted for around $127 billion in assets at the end of June 2007.)

SunTrust

The first taker for Advisorport's new UMA is SunTrust Investment Services (SunTrust IS), the brokerage unit of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks, which calls the program AMC Pinnacle. SunTrust IS also offers a pre-packaged UMA from Advisorport.

John Rhett, chairman and president of SunTrust IS, says having access to a flexible UMA "is critical in a crowded marketplace and [it] supports our market position as a wealth management firm that possesses the products and tools to tailor investment portfolios."

Earlier this year SunTrust launched a UMA platform featuring outside products and managers. But it's administered internally, not by an outsourcer such as Advisorport. Though available to some SunTrust IS advisors, it is mainly intended for the bank's trust-oriented wealth-management group. This in-house UMA also uses overlay-management technology from Upstream.

SunTrust IS employs about 600 brokers in Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Richmond, Va., Jacksonville, Fla., and Washington, D.C.

SunTrust, the retail bank, operates around 1,700 retail branches, mainly in the Southeast.

Advisorport is part of PFPC's Managed Account Services. -FWR

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