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Braving setbacks, FinFolio wins a $1.6 billion RIA and dark-horses its way on to the software track

Index Fund Advisors carefully vetted Tamarac, Orion and Black Diamond for a year but gambled on the newer, smaller vendor -- with the veteran quarterback, Matt Abar

Author Brooke Southall November 6, 2012 at 5:56 PM
Admin:
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Eddie Wong: It's been quite an adventure with FinFolio -- a good one.

Bill Winterberg

Bill Winterberg

November 6, 2012 — 5:01 PM

“it made sense economically to drop its outsourcer and go in-house and use existing staff.”

Wow, I’m amazed at that statement. They have 7 FT EEs who, in one form or another, will need to take time to reconcile and massage daily portfolio data (among other things), which likely is not their highest and best use.

And that came in at a lower price than an outsourced provider?!?

Matt Abar

Matt Abar

November 6, 2012 — 5:19 PM

Hi Bill,

FinFolio has a patent-pending error and alert system that identifies data errors. It makes it much easier for advisers to manage databases. And it’s allowed FinFolio to make our data interfaces extremely accurate. I’m not sure this is entirely the reason IFA was able to use existing staff, but we get rave reviews about the alerts from our other advisers.

Data management isn’t as hard as it used to be. ;-)

Regards,
Matt Abar

Dan Gleason

Dan Gleason

December 12, 2012 — 10:41 PM

As a follow-up on our conversion from BOSS/Portfolio Center to FinFolio, I can tell you that the reconciliation process that we were concerned about 6 months ago, has proved to be a non-issue as we are a bit more than 30 days into our cut-over to FinFolio here.

Originally, Eddie Wong and I discussed the possibility of the Client Services Reps performing the recon process for the Advisors they supported (to help spread the workload to several bodies), but in the end it turned out to be the job of one person for between 20 to 60 minutes each morning and without much excitement or complaints (hat’s off to Matt’s Errors and Alert’s system). I think an article should be written to explain how that works since the recon process seems to have this air of the “Wizard behind the curtain” to it when we were considering taking this process in-house.

I’ve got to admit that I am happily shocked to discover the reconciliation process was not the nail-biting, problem solving, data correction nightmare that I had heard it might be before we began this.

Director of IT
Index Funds Advisors


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