Success Story

Asset Dedication

Integration is instrumental to success

It takes extraordinary vision to launch and grow a successful business. Stephen Huxley and Brent Burns are those types of visionaries. Starting as a research project in the late 1990s at the University of San Francisco's Graduate School of Business, where Huxley is a professor, Huxley and Burns formulated a revolutionary investment approach: engineer custom retirement income portfolios for individuals using liability-driven investing. The cornerstone of this idea is using individual bonds to match a retiree's income stream.

In 2002, they formed Asset Dedication, LLC and put the investment strategy into practice. From the very beginning, they had a long-term vision for the business: become a sub-advisory firm that offers turnkey portfolio management services for investment advisors based on their proprietary investment approach. But, building a technology platform to support the investment approach posed distinct challenges. Some of these challenges are apparent. What might be less apparent is that the calculations required to find the most efficient portfolio could take up to an hour to complete. This limitation in technology made it impossible to build individualized portfolios in a cost-effective way. As a result of the limitation in technology, the company focused solely on consulting with investment advisors that were interested in its strategy.

In 2008, thanks to substantial advances in multi-processor technology, calculations that previously took several hours to complete could be completed in less than a few minutes. These advances removed all technology roadblocks and allowed Burns and Huxley to transform the business into a turnkey portfolio management sub-advisor.

Finding the right partner for technology

As a company with a solid reputation for delivering high quality service, Asset Dedication needed to ensure that it could bring best-in-breed applications to its customers with high reliability and at a competitive price. To create the virtual portfolio management platform they envisioned, Huxley and Burns consulted with Joel Bruckenstein, virtual office technology consultant and publisher of Technology Tools for Today (T3).

"Joel really understood our business," Burns recalls. "He knew that we would experience significant growth in the next few years and that we needed a virtual office platform that would enable us to scale our business in a very cost-effective and timely manner without increasing staff. He had expertise to make that vision a reality."

With the understanding that integration was critical to the success of the technology platform, the team searched for CRM and portfolio management software that would seamlessly share functionality and information across the applications, without manual intervention. In anticipation of rapid growth over the next few years, they also needed a holistic platform for automating their operations and business systems; this strategy would make it possible to seamlessly scale up the business without increasing staff. At the time, a .NET solution with deep integration and a high-level of automation didn't exist.

But when the company contacted Tamarac, they discovered that Tamarac preparing to release its Advisor platform, which combined industry-leading rebalancing software with performance reporting and a highly customized version of Microsoft Dynamics^® CRM. This solution was exactly what Joel Bruckenstein and Asset Dedication were looking for because it would integrate with the best-in-class applications they had already selected.

"We were one of the first companies—possibly even the first—to adopt Tamarac's Advisor platform," recalls Burns. "It was the only back-office solution that met all of our business requirements – particularly those around integration and automation, which were key elements of our business strategy. While there were some risks in being an early adopter of technology, Tamarac delivered everything they promised and have truly exceeded our expectations."

Leveraging Software-as-a-Service

Asset Dedication understands its areas of expertise. That's why an important technology consideration was choosing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in a cloud environment. Investing in a cloud-based solution instead of the company's own datacenter provided scalability without hiring a massive IT department. Sensitive customer information is hosted at a world class SAS 70 II compliant data center and is backed up nightly, which is an SEC requirement. Leveraging a SaaS solution allows the company to dedicate its resources on the customer-facing areas of the business.

"All of our servers are in the cloud, which has greatly reduced our IT expenses," says Burns. "With the cloud, Tamarac and Rackspace manage the infrastructure, set up fault tolerance and redundancy, and develop the disaster recovery plan, which is much more robust than anything we could have developed. We don't own a single server and we can access all of our systems and documents from any computer that's connected to the Internet."

For Asset Dedication, the virtual office has translated into 24x7 availability of its technology platform, and the peace of mind of knowing that its IT infrastructure can scale to meet unpredictable demands such as substantial growth or unexpected spikes in web traffic.

The elegant solution

For Sheila, Tamarac's web-based aspect is integral to her practice. "We have our document management system on a server. After an executed trade, we output the trade order onto the server, client administration-based in Texas-confirms it and makes notes in the contact management system. With Advisor, I can even see training our administrative support to execute trades-faultlessly-while we apply the brains to the business. We like to do research; I will offload trade execution if I can."

Tamarac's focus on tax effects, the software's automated screens of trades, looking for tax penalties and benefits, struck a chord with Sheila. "The four key areas affecting our clients are wealth enhancement, wealth transfer, wealth protection, and charitable giving," she said. With her high net worth clientele, it's crucial for her to find the most effective tax effects when trading.

Provided with an allocation model, Tamarac can factor in tax efficiencies, client preferences, risk tolerance, and restrictions on legacy positions. Tamarac includes the ability to automate margin positions (including separate margin and non-margin cash positions in the same account) and family account reallocations-via three different methods.

Improving on the Human Touch

The Asset Dedication investment approach requires the management of a mountain of paperwork. Because the strategy is directly linked to the client's lifetime financial plan, it requires gathering more information than most investment approaches. By integrating Advisor CRM with Laserfiche^® and Microsoft SharePoint^®, the company was able to automate, manage and track the entire customer lifecycle and the required paperwork.

All customer contacts—regardless of whether they're initiated via the web or the phone—are tracked in Advisor CRM. From Advisor CRM, employees can access all customer documents that are stored in SharePoint and the documents that have been signed with DocuSign^® and are managed by Laserfiche. Directly within Advisor CRM, employees can also access key portfolio information, run performance reports using integration with Advisor View, and initiate a rebalance in real time via its integration with Advisor Rebalancing.



Advisors working with Asset Dedication benefit from this deep level of integration as well. When they log in to the AdvisorSpace portal, a custom application that Asset Dedication developed to manage client proposals, bond inventory, and investment policy statements, advisors have instant access to marketing materials, proposals, and dozens of other documents that are stored in SharePoint. Documents can be signed electronically in DocuSign, which is managed by Advisor CRM's integration with SharePoint and Laserfiche. When a document is signed by a client, it triggers an automated workflow in Advisor CRM that notifies clients and employees of required tasks at each stage of the process. The deep level of automation and integration significantly reduces reliance on resource intensive manual processes and creates a seamless experience for the customers and employees alike.

"As an early adopter of the Advisor platform, we spent some time working with Tamarac to make all the pieces fit together and fine-tune the system. Throughout the process, the entire Tamarac team was outstanding in helping us get things to work the way we wanted them. All the pieces work together with a single sign-on, which creates a seamless experience for our employees as well as the advisors who use our strategy. Now advisors can seamlessly bridge over to Tamarac's Advisor View system so that they can run customized reports real time," Burns explains.

The possibilities ahead

By integrating and automating its portfolio management platform, Asset Dedication now has the level of productivity and customer service it has always imagined. But like most visionaries, Asset Dedication is always looking for new and innovative ways to get the most out of technology.

"We never rest on our successes," Burns says. "We're always looking at ways to leverage technology and refine our processes and automated workflows. We constantly ask ourselves, 'This is how we've done things historically. How can we do it smarter? How can we use technology to do that?'"

Asset Dedication and Tamarac share the same vision for innovation. "We really look at Tamarac as a strategic partner to our business. We think of Tamarac as thought-leaders because they are always looking for innovative products and solutions to better service clients. And that's exactly how we view our business."