"Our primary value proposition has always been to make advisors more efficient, and our new integrated suite extends that benefit across many of the portfolio management workflows used in their office," says Tamarac's cheif executive Stuart DePina. 

 

A thoughtful approach to front-office wealth-management operations can go a long way toward ensuring that technology is benefiting advisors rather than loading them down with repetitious busywork, according to Aite Group, a Boston based consultancy to financial-service companies.

 

Right now the time many advisors spend fiddling with disparate client-service applications is eating into time spent working directly with or on behalf of their clients. The solution, says Aite, is to integrate front-office applications, either by using pre-integrated advisor platforms or through front-office integration frameworks.

 

"Wealth-management firms have thrown far too many tools at their advisors without considering how certain tools fit into the advice process and without defining a consistent technology strategy for the front office," says senior Aite analyst Alois Pirker. "An integrated front-office environment will increase advisors' productivity within a firm, and it will help attract and retain top advisor talent."

 

Tamarac's Advisor 9 platform adds reporting and relationship-management capabilities along with Schwab Performance Technologies' PortfolioCenter for portfolio accounting and MoneyGuidePro financial-planning software to the firm's rebalancing and trading applications.

 

"Advisor 9 uses best-in-class technologies with proven track records, including our own," says DePina. "Most firms are using some or all of these technologies already, which translates to a cost effective and successful transition to our platform."

 

Among Tamarac's institutional clients are San Francisco-based Bingham, Osborne & Scarborough, Bellvue, Wash.-based Coldstream Capital Management, Minneapolis-based LarsonAllen, Providence, R.I.-based Strategic Point Investment Advisors and Newport Beach, Calif.-based United Capital Financial Advisers.