Orion Streamlines Trading Process For Advisors

Wealth-tech solution firm Orion Advisor Solutions has launched a tool for advisors that will streamline their workflow and enable them to execute trades more efficiently.

Advisor Trading consolidates the basic aspects of executing trades with Orion’s traditional advisor portal, Portfolio View, which is where advisors can access their clients’ accounts. There, they can get a big-picture view of the accounts including portfolio, financial plan, and risk, according to Trent Mumma, executive vice president of product at Orion.

Portfolio View did not have any trading capabilities meaning that if an advisor wanted to execute a trade, they had to log on to Orion’s trading platform, Eclipse, or an outside custodian’s site. Advisor Trading incorporates the more commonly used aspects of Eclipse.

“We’re trying to take out the swivel chair movement from an advisor’s perspective where they’re having to turn and log in to different platforms and jump all around and have all the actionable data that they need to see to make decisions,” Mumma said.

In the push to maximize their workflow and become more efficient, advisors are constantly looking for quicker ways to conduct their business. Orion saw the opportunity to take the more routine aspects of the advisor’s job and incorporate it into Advisor Trading.

“Putting simple workflows like raising cash, which every advisor has to do with clients, into the Advisor Trading experience within Portfolio View helps streamline monotonous everyday tasks,” Mumma said.

Advisor Trading is the latest example of Orion making efforts to improve their client’s everyday business.

“We’re always striving to make things easier for the advisor and to do their everyday work,” said Brian McLaughlin, president of Orion Advisor Tech. “We want to be able to provide solutions that are easy to engage but also have the depth and the complexity that they might need as they grow their business.”

Orion is not abandoning Eclipse going forward, but keeping it as a separate and complementary system, Mumma explained. Eclipse is ideally suited for large offices with a home office trading solution. Those firms can use Eclipse to implement their own strategy and do more complex actions including asset location and tax loss harvesting, according to Mumma. 

In addition, Eclipse continues to be extremely customizable, however the firm is incorporating some of that customization into Advisor Trading.

“Eclipse allows all this customization today,” Mumma said. “We took some of the most used customizable features of Eclipse and put that into Advisor Trading.”

The new system is fully integrated into Portfolio View and advisors can access it from there by simply turning it on. There is no additional fee associated with Advisor Trading, Mumma said.

Orion is already eyeing several enhancements to the system for early next year. One is a new series of customizations that clients have been asking for. 

The second and biggest pertains to the tax loss harvesting capabilities that Eclipse currently offers. The firm will integrate a more streamlined version of it in the first quarter of next year, Mumma said.

The firm will also introduce a version of its Orion Compliance into Advisor Trading in the second quarter of next year. It’s a pre-trade compliance solution that will verify the legality of a trade against a set of specified rules, according to Mumma.

“All these rules can be put into the compliance engine and then we would overlay those on top of the Advisor Trading engine, so when the advisor is in their creating the trades it will look at that rules engine and then have workflows where maybe a compliance officer needs to override or approve [a trade],” he said.