[February 06, 2024]

Advisor360° Technology Update: Gifts and Entertainment Compliance Yields Increased Productivity

Financial advisors and their firms are kicking off 2024 with greater efficiency, courtesy of platform enhancements from Advisor360°, a leading provider of integrated technology for enterprise wealth management firms. As 2023 came to a close, Advisor360° updated some of its most popular features, including its Gifts and Entertainment Disclosure capability, bringing an improved workflow experience to all users.

Gifts and entertainment disclosure is critical for compliance with FINRA and SEC regulations, however, traditional record-keeping mechanisms are time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies in documentation, particularly around events with shared clients. Recent updates to Advisor360°'s gifts and entertainment disclosure capabilities reduce time spent on manual entry by 90% compared to commonly used systems¹.

The upgrade eliminates the need for advisors and staff to copy data from multiple fields into others-gift and entertainment reporting is now completed on one screen in a few clicks. When one user makes a single submission on behalf of multiple advisors, the cost per client is calculated automatically, stored in the client's profile and aggregated throughout the year. The new tool also allows advisors to easily export disclosures into tax preparation software, saving time and reducing errors during data entry.

The new auto-aggregation feature helps improve a firm's overall enforcement of its gifts and entertainment disclosure policy. The home office now has a comprehensive view of all gifts across the firm. Client gifts and entertainment within threshold limits can be filtered out, allowing the home office to focus on items that exceed company policies.

"We're helping wealth management firms improve their efficiency while lowering their compliance risks and costs," said Mat Mathews, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Advisor360°. "This enhancement continues our commitment to improving our productivity platform and making financial advisors' lives esier."

A Year of Continued Technology Innovation

Throughout 2023, Advisor360° stayed true to its commitment to improving data quality and increasing user productivity. The company's award-winning integrated and open architecture wealth management platform was updated with enhancements that alleviate administrative burdens, increase efficiency and improve advisor workflows from prospecting to relationship management. Some of these include:

• Onboarding: Continued expansion of the award-winning Digital Onboarding capability including multiple transfer of assets (TOA) functionality, simultaneous multi-account opening within a household, refinements to the Account Opening dashboard for onboarding large numbers of new accounts (1,000 or more) at one time, and the ability to create and fund NFS 529 accounts and directly held ABLE accounts.
• New advisor experience: Overhauled our flagship household management application - Client360° - for a more modern interface with streamlined workflows.
• Integration with Envestnet/Yodlee® to import all external account data from third party financial institutions for a more holistic household view of the end client's net worth. This is in addition to our integration with their managed account platform to create a seamless account opening process with minimal data entry, resulting in a 23% increase in advisory accounts opened on our platform since the integration.
• Planning engagement: Enhancements to WealthGuide®, a toolkit that helps advisors manage and personalize the financial planning experience for clients by organizing all aspects of the financial plan and the advisor-client relationship.
• Investment management: Streamlined the review and rebalance process in the model management and trading capability.
• Relationship management: Launch of the next generation of Investor360°, the end-client portal, with significant upgrades for a more intuitive and interactive user experience.

"Looking ahead, our focus continues to be on productivity gains and actionable insights through new tools and ongoing platform innovation," said Mathews. "Our goal is to equip advisors and the home office with easy access to data they can trust so they can make sound business decisions and provide informed financial guidance to their clients."

About Advisor360°

Advisor360° builds, integrates, and delivers technology for wealth management firms. The company's award-winning integrated and open architecture SaaS platform brings a connected digital wealth experience to financial advisors, their clients, and the home office so that firms can drive better outcomes and innovate quickly. Advisor360° clients benefit from timesaving capabilities and streamlined workflows when it comes to portfolio and performance reporting, financial planning, insurance, proposal generation, trading and model management, digital onboarding, document management, analytics, and compliance. The company's proprietary Unified Data Fabric® (UDF) is the foundation of its platform, weaving together shared services and pre-built integrations that work with existing technology stacks. The company is headquartered in Weston, Massachusetts, with offices in Bengaluru, India; Belfast, Northern Ireland; and a remote workforce in Canada.

Today, three million households with $1 trillion in assets benefit from the connected Advisor360° experience. To learn more, visit www.advisor360.com.

¹. Results from self-reported testing completed by Advisor360° in 2023: Disclosure of 100 gifts took advisors an hour to complete via older processes. With the updated tool, disclosure of the same number of gifts took 12 clicks and five minutes.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240206315659/en/

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