Massey Quick turns to Fortigent for its prowess in alternatives reporting. Fortigent has struck again. The investment-platform consultancy and performance-reporting provider to wealth-management boutiques has extended a streak of recent business wins by adding Massey Quick Wealth Advocates to its roster of more than 50 institutional clients.

Morristown, N.J.-based Massey Quick joins Atlanta-based Apogee Family Office and New York-based iPro One, a provider of operations support and consulting services to CPA-owned wealth managers, as recent sign-ons with Fortigent.

Alternatives platform

"Consistent with our firm's philosophy of treating our clients as peers, Fortigent clearly has the reporting system that we would trust to accurately reflect our own investments," says Leslie Quick III, a founding partner Massey Quick. "We are impressed by the fact that Fortigent has been able to surmount the roadblocks that have typically been associated with effective tracking of alternative investments in high-net-worth investor portfolios, and has been able to fit them so seamlessly into an automated system."

Fortigent's "My Alternatives" platform for reporting on alternative investments "is the result of more than twelve years of experience in serving the alternative investment needs of the high-net-worth investor, and incorporates our newly launched custom-portfolio-accounting system," says Fortigent's chief technology officer Jamie McIntyre.

Accounting for alternative investments is crucial to the effective management of ultra-high-net-worth portfolios. In recent years hedge funds, limited partnerships and the like have accounted for upwards of 40% of a typical high-wealth investor's portfolio. But alternatives can be tricky to track because they aren't updated as frequently as traditional investments and because they're often "held away" from the big custodians whose "feeds" data aggregators rely on.

Fortigent began in the mid 1990s as the back office of Lydian Wealth Management, a multifamily office owned by Lydian, a Palm Beach, Fla.-based holding company. Lydian sold Lydian Wealth Management (now Convergent Wealth Advisors) to Beverly Hills, Calif.-based City National Bank in 2007, but kept Fortigent to continue as an outsourcer. Rockville, Md.-based Convergent Wealth Advisors is still among Fortigent's biggest clients.

Fortigent's past as the investment and operations hub of a high-end investment advisory continues to shape its service offering, according to its consulting and sales head Gary Carrai. "Our foundation in a wealth-management firm means we come at things in ways [other outsourcers] don't -- out of a need to be a good fiduciary and to attract assets," he says.

Herd of bison

For example, Fortigent had to work out how to include the value of a herd of bison in an end-client's performance report. "You're not going to get that kind of information from an electronic interface," says Carrai. He adds that tangible assets like homes, boats and paintings present similar challenges.

Most of Fortigent's institutional clients use it for investment-platform consulting -- manager research, access and due diligence plus advice on asset allocation and asset location -- as well as for performance reporting. But with Massey Quick -- a firm that puts stock, literally, in its own ability to find, vet and access managers -- its mandate is strictly for reporting. Fortigent also provides investment services sans reporting for several of its clients.

"The key in my mind is that we're able to integrate everything," says Carrai. "That way, if you want the whole thing, it's integrated; if you want part of it, you can have that too, no problem -- but even there it's important that we understand the whole process. I think we're atypical in that way."

Fortigent charges its clients a combination of fixed annual retainers and -- for access to certain managers, specialized investments and its unified managed account platform -- fees on assets under management. The size of the fixed fee depends on the "scope" and degree of complexity of the client's relationship with Fortigent, says Carrai.

Rockville, Md.-based Fortigent has more than $20 billion in end-client assets on its platform.

Massey Quick advises high-net-worth clients on assets of about $1 billion. -FWR

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