Advisor Software
Equipping Financial Advisors with the Right Technologies

How can financial institutions and wealth managers/ advisors succeed? The answer is simple. They can thrive if they provide better advice to their customers in a more flexible, efficient, and scalable manner. This is precisely what California-based Advisor Software (ASI) does. It equips financial institutions and wealth managers/ advisors with digital advisor APIs, enabling them to focus on delivering better advice to their customers. Whether financial institutions want to augment their existing solution or build their own investment advice solution, ASI’s Advisor Software Wealth Management APIs allow them to deploy new financial solutions effectively.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Michael Granger, EVP of product and Rishi Srivastava, director of engineering at ASI talk about the challenges in the wealth management space. They also shed some light on how ASI empowers financial advisors and wealth management companies using technology to address their concerns pertaining to client onboarding, financial planning, and portfolio rebalancing, among other functional needs.

What is the unique value proposition of ASI?

Granger: Predominantly, we are focused on providing technology to financial advisors. Our value proposition lies in bringing the institutional-caliber analytics into advisors’ hands via both APIs and directly through applications that employ our APIs.

We are majorly driving the growth of technology which powers the financial advice systems as well as financial institutions that manage and run their own web application. Nowadays, businesses use APIs and develop their web applications or utilize APIs through third parties. Our APIs allow customers to improve their existing solution or develop their advice solution. This enables them to create a unique user experience representing their brand.

Can you elaborate further on your solution, and what are some of its key benefits?

Srivastava: All of our robust technology solutions ensure reduced latency, high scalability, and fault tolerance, and are offered in the AWS cloud environment in any geographic area.

ASI’s distributed micro-service architecture offers operational excellence, security, reliability, performance / scalability, and cost optimization.

Granger: We either utilize our APIs or license them for the financial institutions.

For organizations that purchase APIs directly, we offer portfolio rebalancing or analytics. We have a library of 250 APIs, which businesses can license either to be used as APIs or utilize as a set of APIs to build their application, for example, a Robo-advisor. This simplifies the utilization of APIs individually or in conjunction, allowing financial advisors and institutions to build their own applications.

Alternatively, if the clients do not want to design their applications, they can license the same application from ASI using our APIs that are configured to their needs.

Shed some light on how customers can use your API solutions in the best possible way.

Granger: We provide our clients an API library as well as access to a developer portal through which they can assess the APIs and have their proof of concept (POC) to see how they would utilize them within their organization.

When a new client is onboarded, we have discussions with them to understand whether they need licensed APIs, developer portal process, or licensed applications. Generally, we configure an application for firms that lack technical expertise, whereas the organizations that have skilled staff, particularly in the fintech space, often prefer to take the API approach.

The decision to choose between the APIs or to buy an application is made up front. Many firms take a license to applications first and in parallel, utilize their APIs to build their own applications. For instance, a large independent broker-dealer wanted to rebalance hundreds of thousands of accounts per hour. By utilizing our portfolio rebalancing APIs, they could maintain and control the application for their end-users easily, improving the user experience.

What is Advisor Software currently working on? Also tell us about the future roadmap of the company?

Granger: All our clients provide us feedback, both positive and negative, and we work with them to identify the level of customization or improvement needed to assist them in their development cycle. We are uniquely positioned in the wealth management landscape, helping clients achieve their financial objectives by using the new API technology.

The APIs take the burden off the shoulders of the end customers, enabling them to utilize the application freely without worrying about the vendor. Our team has people with different backgrounds and expertise in the financial services and wealth management segment, which allows them to introduce new features into their APIs. Going forward, the use of APIs by the financial institutions will accelerate and revolutionize the advisory landscape, giving personalized information in the hands of the investors in a cost-effective way.

Srivastava: We have to be strategically positioned onto the path forward in the wealth management space, which is becoming extremely disruptive owing to the market trends.

In the next decade, over 30 trillion dollars of wealth will be produced by baby boomers and children just in North America. Our objective is to capitalize on this trend. We are investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), to Contextualize and Personalize investment advice (for both Clients and Advisors); Transforming various news feeds to provide ‘timed’ market signals and sentiments. We are also investing tremendously in high-value APIs as the industry is producing and consuming massive volumes of APIs and processing them in a shorter timeframe.