How TradePMR enables RIAs to work how they want.
Every RIA is unique with different structures, challenges, and opportunities. As these firms grow, those structures, challenges, and opportunities become increasingly complex.
To effectively evolve over time, growing RIAs need flexibility from their RIA custodians. Many RIAs may feel constricted by their custodial service provider – it’s important that advisors identify what their firm needs from their RIA custodian, and if their current provider is fully delivering on those points.
Flexibility to Facilitate Success
When evaluating RIA custodian technology, advisors likely look to check off some key boxes. Capabilities they want access to, integrations they want to leverage, and support team structure, to name a few.
It’s important that advisors take the time to not only identify how the prospective provider would work with their firm today, but how they would work with their firm as it grows and increases in complexity. Consider three examples:
- Establishing Integrations with New Providers: How would the RIA custodian support your team if you needed to leverage an integration partner that doesn’t currently have a relationship with the provider?
- Personalized Pricing: If you started serving a new client segment with preferences that significantly impacted the price your firm is paying for custodial services, would you have an opportunity to discuss a change to the pricing model?
- Leveraging RIA Data: What if you looked to enhance your firm’s data analytics and needed quick access to in-depth client data, would your RIA custodian willingly share that data in way that was clearly structured and usable?
With some RIA custodians, advisors may be met with rigidity – hard-and-fast rules that the provider maintains for simplicity when serving thousands of RIAs across the country.
This can force RIAs to make decisions that may not be in the best interest of their business, just to fit into the offering of their RIA custodian. Trying to fit this square peg into a round hole can have a long-lasting impact on a firm, potentially hindering its ability to grow.
TradePMR understands this point intimately, and since its foundation has taken on a different approach to custodial services.
TradePMR’s Boutique Offering
TradePMR focuses on serving advisors with flexibility and care to help ensure RIAs are getting the support and technology they need to succeed and grow.
Let’s revisit those three questions from the last section:
- Establishing Integrations with New Providers: While TradePMR maintains deep API integrations with some of the industry’s leading technology vendors, the firm also takes on a flexible approach to data feed integrations. TradePMR can establish data feed integrations with nearly any third-party provider – advisors simply need to ask. The TradePMR support teams work hand-in-hand with advisors to ensure they have access to the capabilities they believe their firm’s need to succeed, whether those are built in-house at TradePMR or accessed via integrations.
- Personalized Pricing: At TradePMR, pricing begins with a conversation, not a one-size-fits-all rate sheet. The firm looks to deliver a pricing model that takes each RIA’s unique situation into mind – its structure, its client base, its unique goals. If those points change throughout the course of the RIA’s relationship with TradePMR, that means there should be another conversation. Pricing at TradePMR is about facilitating RIA growth, not hindering it.
-
Leveraging RIA Data: TradePMR believes that RIA data is just that – the RIA’s data. The firm is committed to sharing data when advisors need it, in a format that RIAs can quickly leverage for analysis. As the largest firms in the industry continue to leverage data to stimulate growth, TradePMR believes there is a major opportunity to democratize access to this data so all RIAs can make data-backed decisions for their businesses. Read more about TradePMR’s approach to data in the firm’s data white paper.
Behind Flexible Technology is Comprehensive Service
In order to deliver technology that meets RIA needs, custodial service providers need to back up that technology with strong service.
Whether it’s for exploring integrations, pricing options, data analytics, or any other business need, RIAs should have access to experienced and knowledgeable support staff at their provider.
If an advisor wastes hours waiting on hold only to connect with support staff that doesn’t understand their unique challenges and what they are trying to accomplish, that time can ended up being a huge waste.
At TradePMR, advisors can get quick access to talented team members that know them by name, understand their firm’s position in the industry, and are empowered to help. We believe TradePMR's boutique approach to service empowers TradePMR team members to have an immediate impact on RIA firms – helping them to navigate the challenges facing their businesses and solve problems in real time.
It's this flexibility that allows TradePMR’s technology to fit the needs of each RIA that works with the provider. Technology alone may not be able to move the needle. It’s about finding the right balance of automation and service to facilitate RIA growth.
Feel Constricted by Your RIA Custodian?
If you feel like your RIA could benefit from greater flexibility from your custodial service provider, we should talk.
We can dive into your firm, your evolving needs, and your growth goals. We can also share a demo of TradePMR’s top-rated Fusion technology1 to see how the platform and TradePMR’s white-glove approach to service could work for your RIA.
1 T3/Inside Information Survey, Joel Bruckenstein and Bob Veres, May 2022, sponsored by AssetBook, Holistiplan, Advyzon, Addepar, and Fidelity Investments, T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey, Joel Bruckenstein and Bob Veres, March 2021, sponsored by Salesforce, and 2019 Software Survey, Joel Bruckenstein and Bob Veres, January 2019, sponsored by Orion Advisor Services and Morningstar, Inc.
