Vanguard Rolls Out Customizable Model Portfolios for Advisers
Vanguard launched Vanguard Custom Model Portfolios, which lets financial advisers tailor select existing Vanguard models to accommodate client preferences while retaining the Vanguard investment approach and low-cost structure. Advisers can modify portfolios based on product preferences, asset classes and management styles.
The offering will include several of Vanguard’s multi-asset and single-asset-class models. According to Vanguard, using models for core portfolio construction can reduce advisers’ portfolio-management time by two-thirds.
Vanguard is working with Vestmark, SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Solutions and Orion Tailored Allocation Portfolios to make the customizable models available through technology workflows that support trading, rebalancing and tax management. The company is also providing white-label and co-branded materials for advisers to use with clients.
Feathery Launches AI Tool For Wealth-Management Proposals
Feathery Inc. introduced an artificial-intelligence-powered proposal-generation tool designed to help wealth management firms produce personalized client proposals at scale. The system combines client data, planning documents, adviser expertise and firm-approved templates in a single workspace, pulling information from platforms such as Salesforce, eMoney, Vanilla, Holistiplan, Addepar and Morningstar.
Feathery’s AI assistant, “Robin,” uses those inputs to draft proposals based on each client’s financial situation, goals and priorities, while preserving the wealth firm’s templates, branding and disclosures. Advisers and other team members can collaborate on drafts and instruct Robin, using natural language, to edit directly in the document.
According to the announcement, the product is intended to reduce the manual preparation and coordination typically required to personalize proposals. It expands Feathery’s existing wealth management automation capabilities, which include adviser onboarding, account opening, adviser transitions and repapering.
Crystal Capital Adds Private Markets Look-Through and Fund Life
Cycle Tools
Crystal Capital Partners LLC launched two proprietary tools aimed at giving financial advisers a clearer view of clients’ private market investments. Its “Schedule of Investments” consolidates underlying portfolio-company holdings, while “Fund Lifecycle” indicates where individual private market funds stand in their investment cycles.
Schedule of Investments presents underlying companies on a single screen, normalizes the information across funds, and shows each company’s status and stage, with data refreshed quarterly from manager reporting. According to Crystal, the feature is designed to replace the process of manually piecing together holdings from fund-level statements.
Fund Lifecycle categorizes funds across deployment, harvest and termination phases, using factors including deployment pace, portfolio company maturity and realized-versus-unrealized ratios. The ratios measure cash actually returned to investors against the estimated paper value of unsold portfolio companies.
According to a Crystal statement, the information can help advisers with portfolio construction, liquidity planning and client discussions. Both tools were developed in-house and are immediately available to advisers on Crystal’s platform without additional setup.