Financial institutions struggle to provide efficient and personalized management of thousands of investor portfolios. Smartleaf co-founder Gerard Michael notes, “Separate account management is typically costly, error prone, and inconsistent. While clients want both tax sensitivity and personalization, they get little of either. Many portfolios are reviewed sporadically, often just once each quarter for rebalancing.” Michael and his team developed Smartleaf Portfolio Manager, with NAG optimization components, to make efficient and personalized account management possible for even the largest financial services companies responsible for thousands of client portfolios.
Open Architecture and Advanced Analytics Enable Superior Performance and Personalized Service
To differentiate themselves, financial institutions are now embracing the concept of ‘open architecture’ where in-house investment models can be blended with models purchased from third party investment firms. Smartleaf enables managers to choose the appropriate research models to best match client requirements for investment portfolios.
In addition, Smartleaf analyzes every account every day and generates client-specific trade recommendations that are tax, risk and expense sensitive, and that take into account any specific customization requests from the client. These trade recommendations enable account executives to provide significantly greater value to clients and show clients how their portfolios may be moved cost-effectively to their targeted composition.
The trade recommendations provided by Smartleaf are the product of the Smartleaf “trade-off engine”, a software feature made possible by NAG optimization components. The more typical approach to producing recommendations is through the creation of a set of “rules” from which the software makes decisions and recommendations. Incorporating the various possible investments, tax regulations and other requirements tends to produce an unwieldy set of input parameters. Using NAG components, Smartleaf has been able to provide better performance and less complexity. Perhaps the ultimate benefit of this sophisticated software technology is that account managers can devote more attention to understanding client requirements and help clients to make better investment decisions.
Stability and Breadth One Can Trust Independent Software Vendors
(ISVs) know how specialized expertise can readily translate into advantages in highly competitive markets. In particular, Smartleaf’s creators understood that time-to-market was critical and focused on developing a system that could translate modern portfolio theory, tax theory and analytics into a unified system. NAG’s reputation and the comprehensive nature of the NAG Library made the selection of NAG components the obvious choice.
A Partner One Can Count On
Mark Nitzberg, co-founder/CTO of Smartleaf, comments, “Our relationship with NAG has been positive since the very beginning. Whenever our development team had questions, NAG’s staff were quick to answer and provide us the support we needed. The documentation that NAG provides is excellent and presented very well in layers of detail. NAG makes everything very available and easy-to-find.”“When we first started three years ago, we knew that we had potential in the market and NAG knew it too. We were a small company, but NAG’s CEO (former), Rob Meyer, went out of his way to regularly visit us and offer assistance. NAG is a partner Smartleaf can count on.”