Top 10 Myths about Riskalyze’s firmwide Solutions

Think you know Riskalyze? Think again! We’re ready to bust the top ten myths about Riskalyze’s firmwide solutions.

Myth #10: Riskalyze is primarily a risk questionnaire solution.

REALITY: 

Sure, a risk assessment built on a Nobel Prize-winning academic framework is certainly a great way to arrive at the right risk target for a portfolio, but assessments aren’t the only thing we do—in fact, they aren’t even our most-used feature.

Riskalyze provides advisory firms with solutions for engaging clients, analyzing investments, managing portfolios, automating trading, maintaining compliance, and more. More firms use Riskalyze to go deep into portfolio analytics than anything else.

A risk assessment is a great piece to include in a conversation about risk, but not all wealth management firms choose to use risk assessments. There are other ways to arrive at a portfolio’s target, and in-depth portfolio analytics can help any advisor or firm know that they’ve got clients invested right.

Myth #9: We can’t customize the Partner Store to use our own home office proprietary models or preferred partners.

REALITY: 

The Riskalyze Partner Store is a great collection of free ETF and mutual fund models from a variety of the industry’s favorite asset managers like First Trust, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and many more.

For our firm partners, the Partner Store becomes a revenue driver. Financial advisory firms can customize it, prioritize certain strategists, add in their own home office models, and wrap it all in a program fee that fits their business model.

Myth #8: Autopilot takes assets off of our platform and out of our custodial relationship.

REALITY: 

If you’re an independent broker-dealer, you’re used to third party asset management solutions somewhat competing with your corporate RIA.

The Riskalyze platform is different. We’re a technology-driven solution that keeps 100% of your firm’s assets on your firm’s platform, and inside of your volume agreements with your custodians. All of your trading oversight, monitoring and dashboards continue to work exactly as they do right now when your advisors trade.

Our DNA is that of a technology company with incredible design and user experience skills that translate into financial tech solutions that fade into the background, so that the brilliance of your advisors’ work can shine through. In fact, we’re not even a registered entity. As a pure-play technology company, we help you deliver better experiences to your advisors, and drive your growth.

Myth #7: All portfolio management and trading systems have difficulty integrating with multiple custodians.

REALITY: 

Most trading systems might struggle with (or intentionally limit) multi-custodial functionality, but we aren’t one of them.

Multi-custodial trading isn’t just possible with Riskalyze—it’s magical. With Connected Trading, you can automatically execute trades on accounts custodied at Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, Pershing, and RBC. We also work with self-clearing firms to integrate Connected Trading with their clearing capabilities.

There’s no jumping back and forth between systems, and you don’t even have to think about downloading trade files for each custodial relationship. Connected Trading does it all for you, leveraging the powerful Flyer trading network.

Myth #6: If we let advisors use this new trading automation experience, we’ll have to manage exceptions and errors with yet another system.

REALITY: 

Our trading automation platform is sophisticated enough to resolve most trade errors at the advisor level, without having to escalate those to the custodian or the home office. With Connected Trading, they’ll receive a real error message to let them know exactly why the custodian rejected a trade (like an account closing without their knowledge).

The platform also dynamically monitors trade orders to ensure that sell orders are executed first to generate the cash needed for buy orders. What used to be a manual process now happens without the advisor even having to think about it.

When it comes to allocations, Riskalyze also automatically manages the process. The system looks for block execution, and then posts allocations to sub-accounts in the original trade batch, all without the advisor lifting a finger.

And meanwhile, there are no alternative dashboards or systems that a home office or firm leader needs to add to manage trade exceptions, errors, or supervision. All of your trading oversight, monitoring, and dashboards continue to work exactly as they do right now when your advisors trade.

Myth #5: Riskalyze can’t perform risk calculations for both SMA and UMA account types.

REALITY: 

If an advisor is running a tactical SMA portfolio that trades daily, the holdings in that account on a given Thursday might not reflect the overall risk at the strategy level if you look at the portfolio’s performance over a longer time frame. So how is an advisor supposed to have a conversation with a client about the risk of that account when it might look very different on a daily basis?

Riskalyze makes it simple to do complex analysis of risk at the account as well as strategy level. We support both SMA and UMA account types so advisors can jump back and forth between views and have deep conversations with clients about complex strategy types that require a more nuanced look at risk. And we leverage actual data about the performance of those strategies, rather than their holdings at the current moment, to calculate a Risk Number for them.

Myth #4: Riskalyze can only provide analytics for stocks, ETFs, and some mutual funds.

REALITY: 

We don’t do things halfway here at Riskalyze; we cover nearly a million securities, products and strategies.

That means we have every US stock, ETF, and mutual fund; SMA third party money managers; variable annuity subaccounts; individual corporate, government, and municipal bonds, and a large roster of non-traded alternatives, UITs, annuities, and REITs. We even cover the federal thrift savings plan funds.

On the off chance we don’t have an investment pre-loaded into Riskalyze, it’s easy to create a custom investment for the assets that need to roll up into an account or portfolio — and the details behind that custom investment are clearly disclosed to avoid compliance issues, and ensure clients can easily understand.

Myth #3: Riskalyze equips us with advisor solutions, but not compliance oversight solutions.

REALITY: 

We cover a lot more ground than client engagement, portfolio construction, and trading automation. We also provide home office and firmwide administrative teams with tools to assist with company-wide compliance requirements.

Whether you’re preparing for Regulation Best Interest, or need better risk monitoring of accounts across your firm, we have firmwide solutions that can help. Check out Command Center to learn more about our most comprehensive compliance solution to date.

Myth #2: Riskalyze has simply married an intuitive user interface to the same, traditional risk methodology that has been in use for 50+ years.

REALITY:  

We don’t assess risk in the same old way — we’ve reimagined it. While traditional methods were satisfied with mapping securities to asset classes and assuming they were all in lock step with each other, we built Riskalyze to go deeper than any other methodology.

We built Riskalyze the hard way — from the bottom up — with individual security-level risk analysis, and we believe in objective data. Analytics are recalculated every single night, so your advisors and home office staff are always up-to-date. Risk alignment is determined by measuring every single holding in every client portfolio so you can discuss risk with confidence instead of guesswork.

Myth #1: The Riskalyze process can’t work in conjunction with enterprise solutions I’ve built my firm around, like Envestnet.

REALITY:

It’s true that our trading automation platform has some overlaps with Envestnet’s APM and FSP solutions, but many advisory firms who swear by Riskalyze for risk, proposal, and portfolio analytics are also running their trading and managed account operations on Envestnet and other similar platforms.

For advisors using Envestnet, we’ve already mapped Risk Number analytics to both their 5 and 7-point Investment Objectives Scales, so the two systems snap together out of the box. Or if you’d prefer, you can establish your own custom mapping.

Riskalyze helps advisors navigate the advice relationship all the way from initial client engagement to portfolio analytics to trading automation. And if you only want to lean on Riskalyze for those first two steps, our integration makes your workflow easy to manage.

From single-advisor shops to large enterprises, Riskalyze is built to snap into the workflows of the best solutions the industry has to offer.