BNY Mellon’s Pershing is integrating NetX360+, its custody platform and Wove, its wealth management platform to allow advisors to move seamlessly between the two.

Sareena Dalla Brookshire, chief product officer at BNY Mellon’s Pershing, told Markets Media: “We have extremely high conviction around connected technology, supported by connected data and elegant experiences, which will help our clients be more productive.”

The firm recently reviewed its strategy and committed to interoperability and a multi-year investment to integrate NetX360+ and Wove.

“We are an open architecture shop, but we want to make sure that clients have the greatest products on the shelf which are easy to integrate into portfolios,” she added.

Dalla Brookshire expects the trends of consolidation, the growth of alternatives and the need for talent to persist, alongside the growth of model portfolios and direct indexing. As a result, the demand for high quality advice will increase, as will consumer expectations around service and experience.

“The increase in demand means there will be a supply challenge with advisors, so it is very important for them to be as efficient as possible with their time and energy,” she added. “This productivity challenge provides an opportunity for us to help more advisors help more people.”

She cited a report that 90% of investors who have advisor relationships expect their advisors to know them really well. Therefore, advisors need time to engage and Dalla Brookshire argued that productivity gains can be unlocked through technology.

There is a flurry of consolidation in wealth management due to the imperative to become bigger and more profitable according to a white paper from data provider Cerulli Associates in May this year. The top five wealth management firms control 57% of broker/dealer assets under management, and 32% of broker/dealer advisors, while the top 25 and their various affiliates control 92% of assets and 79% of advisors, said the report.

Bing Waldert, managing director at Cerulli, said in the report: “In the wake of a merger or acquisition, firms rarely emerge as well-oiled machines providing best-in-class capabilities and service offerings. As wealth management firms enter new segments through acquisition, they must have a plan to transition clients to service models that meet their needs.”

Integration 

At its INSITE conference in June 2002,  BNY Mellon’s Pershing introduced NetX360+, to provide advisors with a more streamlined user interface and a more intuitive experience. At last year’s conference the firm debuted Wove, which features applications for advisors such as advanced data reporting and analytics, financial plan building, cross-custodian trading and rebalancing and access to direct indexing investment strategies.

Dalla Brookshire said the firm has made a long-term commitment over a multi-year period to continue to improve the overall experience for advisors with critical investments around asset movement, onboarding, simplification of workflows, the overall experience and personalization.

Pershing has introduced personalization enhancements across menus, search and next best action according to Dalla Brookshire. A one-stop client portal allows investors to check balances on a single interface and view account information across multiple custodians, while using self-serve features to complete simple tasks, with personalized menus. Next best action looks at the overall book of work and makes recommendations based on specific workflows.

New capabilities are going to be rolled out for money movement enhancement and collaborative functionality between advisors and clients. The innovation roadmap also includes building out portfolio solutions to make it easy for clients to access investments, solutions and strategies and enhanced data and APIs with a multi-custodial data API marketplace.

“Growth is coming form large-scale registered investment advisors who are expanding via acquisition and need a multi-custodial solution,” said Dalla Brookshire. “Being able to offer a solution is a differentiator for serving that client base.”

Pershing is also aiming to reduce the time needed for advisors to access data and produce reports.

“We explored addressing this problem through natural language search, which complements our existing reporting suite by asking the right questions and receiving addressable data and reporting,” she added.  “We call this ‘time to insight’, a metric that we now measure.”

This new capability, which was launched this year, cut the time for report generation from more than 20 to 30 minutes to a matter of seconds, according to Dalla Brookshire. Adoption is increasing and  Dalla Brookshire said the firm is measuring progress around usage, which increases productivity for clients.

“We are very excited about emerging technologies and capabilities to drive productivity capabilities,” she added. “We have a central artificial intelligence hub that governs the processes and high-level strategies.”

INSITE 2024

On 4 June, at this year’s INSITE conference, Pershing said it has added features to Wove including the first tool designed for investors and a cloud-based tool created for C-suite financial executives to better manage enterprise data.

Ainslie Simmonds, Pershing X president and Pershing global head of strategy, said in a statement:  “Advisors asked us to create a simple, interconnected portal for their clients, so we built Wove Investor, while Wove Data enables larger firms to turn vast amounts of data into actionable business intelligence.”

At this year’s INSITE conference Dalla Brookshire is also hosting a masterclass on product leadership and innovation with leaders from across the financial services industry ranging from fintechs to large-scale players. She is covering four themes – building a culture of innovation; rethinking your product set; balancing running the business versus changing the business; and talent.