Getting Over the Hurdles
Many advisors recognize the value of partnering with a TAMP to provide clients with superior investment management services. But what you may not fully realize is how a TAMP's back office services can ease the daily burden of managing your practice and free you up to spend more time with clients and prospects. In other words, outsourcing many of the time-consuming functions essential to an outstanding client experience can enable you to scale your business cost-efficiently and focus on growing your practice by doing the work you enjoy most.
So, what back office capabilities can a TAMP provide, and how can those services help you? Let’s look at what we consider the five essential functions your TAMP should offer.
five essential functions of a tamp:
1. Reporting
Access to enterprise-level data within your practice is essential. You need robust reporting capabilities for business intelligence and strategic planning. And your clients demand it for performance insight at the account, portfolio, and household level. The best TAMPs provide intuitive user interfaces so that generating manual and automatic reports is quick and easy.
2. Reconciliation
Data files from each custodian and aggregation service should be reconciled every day to keep trading account activity current and accurate. Reconciliation helps ensure the accuracy of daily account and portfolio performance.
3. Aggregation
A common concern for advisors is whether they can consolidate all existing client accounts and assets within their new practice. That is why it is crucial to partner with a TAMP that can efficiently aggregate all custodial accounts and assets held in outside accounts (such as 401(k) and 529 plans) and make sure those accounts are reconciled regularly.
4. Billing
Your practice is unique, as is the way you choose to invoice clients for your services. A TAMP should be able to provide the flexibility for you to bill clients on a monthly or quarterly basis, either in advance or in arrears. In addition, your TAMP should generate billing files in a format that is ready for upload to your primary custodian(s).
5. Trading
Your TAMP should offer efficient trade management functionality and execution, enabling you to implement the strategies you deem most important to serving your clients, including rebalancing, household management, or tax harvesting. Plus, some TAMPs have a Unified Managed Account (UMA) capability, giving you the ability to implement and report on multiple models within a single account.
Other Considerations
Understanding the five essential back office services that a TAMP should provide can help you assess your current provider or help you evaluate and interview a new provider. There are few other things to also keep in mind if you are considering outsourcing your back office functions.
collateral
One important area is collateral materials. Whether it’s firm-level analysis or client-facing presentations, you’ll be benefited by having flexible proposal and reporting capabilities at your fingertips. A proposal tool can help you efficiently create client-ready presentation materials to win new business.
business intelligence
A global reporting function will provide useful business intelligence metrics across your entire book of business, such as allocation summaries, security cross references, global performance, and more. A TAMP with on-the-fly reporting capabilities can assist you in supporting any clients’ individual, household, or portfolio performance reporting needs seamlessly.
user experience
Another factor to consider is usability. As mentioned earlier, a technology may be the best in the world, but if it is not intuitive and easy to use, it may never provide the efficiencies and potential cost savings you desire. Complicated systems that are difficult to learn and manage may even increase your costs - and frustrations. The best TAMPs have created their back office technologies to solve common advisor problems, and a big one of those challenges is the need for simplicity.
cost
Another key consideration is cost. TAMPs come in all shapes and sizes, and they provide a variety of different services. It helps to identify those areas of your practice that are most time-consuming or are causing bottlenecks. By knowing the two or three areas of greatest need, you can focus on a TAMP’s capabilities to solve those challenges, and you can assess the strength of one TAMP to another in those specific areas.
