High-tech jargon around outsourced wealth management support obscures the basic relationships and the goal of the entire enterprise. If we’re all just pushing each other’s buttons, what’s the point?
Not so long ago, electronic stock trading was an exotic new novelty and advisors communicated exclusively by phone, fax and face to face. That’s the low-tech world that spawned a lot of firms like ours, where none of the heavy lifting we did behind the scenes ever got in the way of the people we work with.
The world has changed a lot in a few short decades. Technology enables us to deliver remote backoffice support in ways that industry gurus could barely imagine when we started.
But while we’ve invested a lot in deep code and computing architecture, we make sure the advisors we work with never need to worry about it. They don’t consider us “a technology company.”
The technology is only the infrastructure that brings us together. We keep it running in the background so you can get back to work.
After all, the goal of any effective outsourcing relationship — whether you call it a TAMP, a virtual back office or just operational support — is to make life simpler. Bringing the technology forward doesn’t simplify anything.
If anything, focusing on the systems makes an advisor’s life even more complicated. So we keep it in the background where you’ll never see it.
Let the support team worry about the robots
You’re the front office. Firms like us are the back office. We each play our role.
The people in the front office spend their days communicating with clients, making sure they’re happy, bringing their top game to prospect meetings.
It’s not the kind of thing “robo advisors” are programmed to do well. Until that happens, the robots stay in the back, running the automated processes that add up to a client experience you can endorse with confidence.
The clients never go in the back or inspect your data platform, so they’ll never see the robots. You’re our client. If we can get you to forget about all the systems running in the background, we’ve done our job.
That’s why we don’t talk about technology or position ourselves as a technology provider. We save that shop talk for internal discussion. Our marketing — and let’s face it, every contact we make in the industry, even this one — strips out all the buzzwords and jargon that drive Silicon Valley first and Wall Street second.
After all, we’re veterans of the independent advisory business ourselves, not programmers. We recognized the power and limitations of technology early on, so we could get ahead of the trend. But we acknowledge that learning to speak the language of Silicon Valley isn’t an achievement in itself.
You are advisors and we need to speak to you in language you find meaningful. That means leaving the inner mechanics of what we do in the back room, much as you don’t burden your prospects with a whole lot of detail on why you work with one custodian instead of another and who prints your business cards.
And it means we don’t spend a lot of effort positioning ourselves in opposition to other companies in our space. We aren’t really interested in defining our marketing category because we know you don’t really care what we call ourselves.
Do we provide access to elite investment models through our wholesale relationship with Dimensional Fund Advisors? Definitely — did the heavy lifting to join the DFA institutional network early on. There’s no incentive for you to reinvent that wheel.
Do we run all the reporting, billing and account reconciliation while keeping your client-facing portals up and running? Definitely.
Are we loaded with time-tested marketing and business development strategies and support? If you scale, we scale. No question.
Maybe the sum of all these parts makes us a “turnkey asset management platform.” That’s a mouthful and “TAMP” isn’t much better. Call us whatever you like. If the relationship is good, the jargon will only get in the way.
Not just a “high touch feel”
Of course the magic word in “TAMP” is really “turnkey.” When you’re driving a Tesla or other high-performance vehicle, you don’t really care about all the science or how each of the systems was engineered. The ride and the velocity are what really matters.
Investors have a similar relationship with their advisors. For most, it’s less about what’s under the hood than the hum of power when you turn that key and watch the needles start moving.
We’ve already built what we consider a world-class vehicle. It’s the same model we built for our clients when we were first coming up on the RIA side ourselves. They loved it.
Now we’re letting other advisors turn the key. There’s room here for everyone. The vehicle keeps its eyes on the road so we can all concentrate on providing the best end-to-end experience we can — we’re responsive so you can be responsive, and all that high touch along the chain adds up to visible value no pure robot can match.
They may not appreciate the fact that you’re letting them work with low-cost institutional-grade portfolios that only a rarefied handful of retail advisors will ever be cleared to touch. They probably don’t care about the network architecture that keeps their accounts up to date whenever they log in to check. But the ride is extraordinary.
Don’t get me wrong, you’re still doing the driving. We know independence is a habit few advisors who’ve had their taste of freedom ever want to break. We’re just the pit crew, keeping your portfolios rotated and the engine purring.
