Joel Bruckenstein takes a skeptical look at Adhesion’s WealthADV platform over on Morningstar Advisor. It’s an interesting offering, but isn’t a generic portfolio management system and it requires you partially buy in to their account management philosophy, which focuses on UMAs. They network into various money managers who can manage specific accounts for you.

WealthADV is not a portfolio management system like Axys or PortfolioCenter. In fact, they’re actually using PortfolioCenter behind the scenes to run the platform:

Adhesion Technologies has made some astute decisions with regard to their portfolio accounting and performance reporting. They use Schwab’s PortfolioCenter for portfolio accounting (for example tracking tax lots) but they calculate performance using their own proprietary performance engine. “This is one of their competitive advantages”, says Gardner. Why?  Well, first of all, one of the major impediments to changing portfolio accounting systems is the data conversion. If an advisor currently using PortfolioCenter in-house wants to switch to an outsource provider that uses some other application, the conversion process will require time and an additional outlay. A move from PortfolioCenter to WealthADV does not require a conversion since Wealth ADV already uses PortfolioCenter. Since PortfolioCenter is probably the most widely used portfolio management and accounting system among Adhesion prospects, compatibility with PortfolioCenter is a big plus.

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I just stumbled on Marketcetera, our industry’s first open source STP trading platform. This isn’t really for investment advisors, it’s for hedge funds and large trading desks that use FIX to do straight through processing. I would assume it competes with Advent Moxy and FlexTrade. Or *will* compete, since it’s still under development.

From their web site:

A true alternative to expensive, monolithic proprietary trading systems or brittle software mashups, the Marketcetera Platform is a comprehensive open-source software infrastructure of ready-to-use components that gives users maximum flexibility and technology choice.

This is really exciting. I hadn’t realized anybody outside of our own FinFolio effort was working on an open source project for wealth management. They’re using traditional open source Java-based tools, but also released a .Net API as a concession (one would assume) to the large numbers of Microsoft silo programmers in our industry.

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Davis Janowski jumps on the all-in-one-software-is-dead bandwagon with a recent article in Investment News. The article largely documents the conversation flow of a vendor roundtable at the Chicago FPA conference. It’s peppered with depressing quotes from both advisors and vendors talking about how hard it is to make their software applications talk to each other.

Janowski says:

Problems come and problems go, but linking adviser tools so that data entered once can populate several software programs — that’s a problem that seems eternal.

I think that all the industry pundits have now thrown in the towel on integrated software except, possibly, for Joel Bruckenstein, who said nice things recently about both the Your Silver Bullet initiative and Interactive Advisory Software’s integrated solution.

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There’s a new article in Financial Advisor Magazine that talks about FinFolio. The article is a good technical discussion of some of the things we’re working on. We’ll be releasing parts of FinFolio software as open source, using Microsoft’s new Silverlight for the UI, and fanatically wrapping everything in unit tests to ensure a bug-free first release. But mainly, the article closes out the Techfi story by talking about the Advent sale.

From Unfinished Business:

Meanwhile, Rob Major, a co-founding minority partner, became embroiled in disagreements with Abar about the direction of the company. Abar now admits that he was having trouble finding qualified executives with knowledge of advisor technology and good operations management skills to help lead the company. Abar says he explored raising $2 million in the spring of 2002 to address operational, technology and personnel issues and elevate Techfi to the next level, but with the tech bubble burst it would have meant giving up at least a 40% stake in the company. That was when Advent made an offer to buy Techfi.

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