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As many advisors already know, alternatives are an attractive asset class and one suitable for a broad range of clients. Alternatives are effective at reducing correlations, enhancing portfolio diversity and boosting income, among other favorable traits.
If there's a rub for advisors when it comes to allocating to alternatives, it's the burdensome back-end process that often involves cumbersome manual inputs, piles of paper work and long lag times. This nuisances are living borrowed time thanks to WealthForge's Altigo platform.
Altigo streamlines the alts investment process, allowing advisors to perform alts business across all the fund managers and sponsors they transact with. The platform also allows advisors to filter by sponsor and offering type, making location of crucial seamless and time-efficient. Getting down to one of the primary benefits of Altigo, it reduced not-in-good-order errors, which advisors experienced with alts know can be a real drag.
“Altigo’s success and high rate of both sponsor and advisor adoption is due to the meaningful results it provides,” according to WealthForge. “The platform reduces NIGO (not-in-good-order) error rates from 30-60 percent down to a mere 4 percent and boasts investment cycle-times of 2 days, compared to approximately 3-4 weeks on average using paper processes. Orders can be completed in 20 minutes or less, with 70% submitted for acceptance by the sponsor the same day.”
Altigo Alts Advantages
Altigo makes tracking alts investments and delivering that data to clients easier for advisors, too. Advisors can use the platform to filter by issuer, investment type and more, creating more visibility will fostering steady subscription flow.
"As Independent Broker Dealers and RIAs seek to modernize their infrastructure to better compete and scale up, companies like Wealthforge have joined the fight with products like Altigo. Our ability to automate everything from paperwork processing to operational workflow greatly improves our ability to manage the workload associated with alternative investments. While the extra effort is leading many firms to move away from these opportunities, Altigo allows us to embrace them," said Douglas Blake, managing director – investment services at Kingswood U.S.
With benefits like that it's not surprising that Altigo's user community is on a pace of exponential growth.
“The automation of custodian forms was recently announced including Pershing, RBC Wealth Management, Equity Trust Company, Mainstar Trust, Millennium Trust, NuView Trust, Vantage, CNB Custody, and now TD Ameritrade,” notes WealthForge. “With this feature, reps and advisors select the investment, client, and custodian during the online order entry process, which automatically pulls in required forms such as letters of authorization or direction of investment in addition to the standard subscription agreement and home office-required documents.”
Altigo Evolution
Something else advisors know is that technology is an increasingly prominent part of the business and keeping up with technological advances is vital to practice success and client outcomes. In any business, owners and executives that don't adapt and evolve with the times risk being left behind and losing clients. On that note, Altigo represents evolution and positive disruption in the alts marketplace.
This year, WealthForge is “rolling out integration with AI Insight to ensure rep training is complete if it is required by the firm before the package is sent for signature,” according to the firm. “The remainder of the year will see integrations with additional custodians, clearing firms, transfer agents and fund admins as well as more Marketplace product discovery and comparison features.”
Recently added features to Altigo include retail CRM integration, artificial intelligence integration, DocuSign knowledge-based authentication, supplemental data collection, a chat feature and much more.
The future is now advisors looking to eschew the old way of embracing alts and that future is Altigo.
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