Financial advisors spend countless hours managing client portfolios, updating spreadsheets and trades across multiple accounts by hand—and hoping nothing breaks in the process. For many, rebalancing represents a necessary evil: critical to portfolio management but fraught with complexity and potential for error.
Jerry Barrs, CIPM, Senior Product Manager at SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Solutions, believes advisors deserve better. The team has built the SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Solutions Rebalancer, a solution that seeks to transform one of wealth management’s most complicated tasks into a streamlined, automated process. By shifting the focus from individual accounts to the household level, Black Diamond aims to align portfolio construction with client goals while minimizing administrative constraints.
“The Rebalancer is designed to take the heavy lifting out of portfolio management,” Barrs explains. “Instead of advisors spending hours in spreadsheets, manually updating trading accounts account by account, we created a system that’s looking to automate trading. It’s looking to rebalance not only at the account level but also at that household or client level.”
Eliminating Manual Processes and Their Risks
For advisors still working from spreadsheets and porting data back to custodians, the error risk compounds with every step. Each manual touch point introduces opportunities for mistakes—incorrect allocations, missed trades, or data entry errors. Black Diamond’s approach removes human intervention wherever possible.
“The goal is to simplify the process by saving time, reducing errors, and giving advisors a more scalable, user-friendly solution,” Barrs says. Beyond automation, the system integrates features and reporting capabilities essential for compliance and regulatory oversight. “It’s about building in those controls and also allowing for the type of reporting that you need to be able to have oversight, both from a compliance standpoint and from a regulatory body standpoint as well,” Barrs adds.
The platform connects directly to major custodians via a FIX trading network, eliminating the tedious export–import cycle. “We have a fixed trading network that works with all the major custodians out there in this space to automate that process to be able to not only send trades and allocations but also to get back information like average price, as well as the ability to see if there are any errors occurring in real time,” Barrs notes.
Real-time error detection can allow advisors to address issues immediately, and the digital paper trail seeks to support both compliance teams and client transparency.
Trust Through Transparency
For Black Diamond, building a transparent system isn’t just a feature—it’s part of the firm’s philosophy. Barrs emphasizes that trust is at the center of their design.
“That’s the key to what we’re doing,” he says. “We’re looking to make something that our advisors have trust in and that they’re able to take a peek under the hood to understand what we’re doing and to have faith that we’re acting in the best interest of their clients.”
Enhanced reporting capabilities extend beyond compliance requirements. Advisors can gain visibility into every aspect of the rebalancing process, understanding not just what the system did but why. Building confidence in automated processes requires transparency, and Black Diamond designed its reporting structure around delivering both oversight and insight.
Household-Focused Portfolio Construction
Where Black Diamond’s Rebalancer truly distinguishes itself is in its household-centric architecture. Traditional rebalancing tools operate at the account level, leaving advisors to manually aggregate multiple accounts to understand a client’s overall position. Black Diamond inverts the model.
“From the start, Rebalancer is household focused,” Barrs explains. “It focuses on making sure that an advisor gets a holistic view of their client, of their risk and return preferences, and that they’re able to make sure that portfolio they’re constructing aligns with that client goal.”
Whether advisors build around an investment policy statement (IPS) or client risk tolerance, the system enables them to construct portfolios based on client objectives first, with account-level adjustments happening within that broader framework. It mirrors the way advisors think about their clients—and the way clients view their wealth.
UMA Trading: The Next Evolution
Building on the household focus, Black Diamond is launching unified managed account (UMA) trading capabilities, targeted for late 2025 or early 2026. Barrs says client feedback has been central to the development.
“We listened to our clients. We understand that UMA is an important part of how they’re delivering wealth management and asset management to their clientele,” he explains. The new functionality will allow advisors to divide accounts into sleeves, apply different strategies to each, and rebalance the full portfolio to help maintain preferred alignment.
“We wanted to create something that gives advisors the flexibility to split out accounts into multiple sleeves, to manage those sleeves based on different strategies, and also be able to rebalance the entire UMA or the entire household to make sure that the allocation of those sleeves stays on target for what they’re looking to offer to their clients.”
The UMA capability moves past technical flexibility into goal-based wealth management at scale. Many advisors think of UMA sleeves as containers for asset classes or model managers, but Black Diamond’s household focus will enable firms to structure sleeves around what clients actually want—whether it be retirement security, college funding, or a vacation home. Each sleeve will pursue its own strategy while the household stays properly allocated overall.
“We’re really excited about that,” Barrs adds.
Platform Integration: Where UMA Gets Powerful
UMA structures often create operational complexity. Multiple sleeves mean multiple sets of records to maintain, reconcile, and report. Black Diamond addresses operational overhead through native integration across its wealth platform.
“We’re not creating these sleeves in silos,” Barrs explains. “These sleeves are being created and harnessed in the rebalancer, but really, the goal is that that information flows back into the rest of the platform. You can use that in reporting within the client portal and anywhere that you’re used to seeing account information as a Black Diamond user.”
Integration means the Rebalancer becomes a gateway rather than an endpoint. Information flows through to reporting, client portals, and every other platform component. Advisors work within a 360-degree view where trades generate automatically, the system knows where trades belong, and reconciliation places transactions in the correct sleeves the following day.
“A lot less babysitting than would typically come along with UMA accounting and rebalancing,” observes Barrs. The reduction in operational overhead makes sophisticated account structures practical for firms that previously avoided them because of the administrative burden.
What Resonates with Advisors
When Black Diamond tests new capabilities with existing advisors, certain pain-relieving features consistently resonate. Barrs notes that managing everything in one place immediately appeals to advisors—no more duplicating efforts or reconciling accounts across multiple systems.
Equally important is the consistent flow of information from beginning to end. “Being able to use that information kind of from start to finish—both in reporting and rebalancing—is huge,” says Barrs. “So, that way, they can trade in the same way that they’re talking to their clients and they’re telling their story. And it doesn’t feel deprecated in the sense that you have these two different processes that are working against one another.”
When advisors talk to clients the same way they manage portfolios, the disconnect can clear. Reporting and rebalancing become part of one continuous conversation rather than competing workflows.
UMA structures offer clear strategic value, yet many advisory practices avoid them because of the operational headaches. “That’s the biggest thing that we’ve heard from our advisors is that they want the ability to sleeve accounts and they want the ability to work on that UMA style of accounting, but it’s always been the overhead. It’s always been the operational burden that they’re most worried about,” he points out.
Sometimes, advisors don’t even realize they’re tolerating unnecessary complexity—they’ve simply learned to live with how things have always worked. Black Diamond aims to challenge assumptions about what portfolio management technology should require from its users. “It’s just ingrained in what they’re doing, and we’re looking to kind of turn that on the head a little bit and really bring something kind of groundbreaking to market,” Barrs explains.
Innovation as Core Identity
Black Diamond offers something increasingly rare in wealth management tech: the freedom to practice the way you want rather than the way your legacy systems allow. It doesn’t treat innovation as an occasional initiative. Much like its commitment to transparency, the company has continuous evolution baked into its operating outlook. “The ethos of the Black Diamond platform is innovating and delivering on what our advisors are looking for,” Barrs says.
The philosophy shapes how the team tackles problems. Instead of layering new features onto outdated frameworks, they challenge the frameworks themselves. By starting with client households rather than administrative structures, eliminating manual processes rather than just streamlining them, and by building native integration rather than connecting disparate systems, Black Diamond is offering advisors a modern system designed for how they want to operate.
Black Diamond’s Rebalancer also reflects a larger shift in the industry. Tools that once seemed adequate—spreadsheets, account-level rebalancing, disconnected systems—are becoming roadblocks. As client expectations rise and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, advisors need platforms that reduce operational burden while increasing capabilities.
The household-focused Rebalancer—with its upcoming UMA trading capabilities and native platform integration—mirrors the way advisors think and work, rather than forcing them to conform to the system.
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