Data management and processes will become ever more important this year in light of the upcoming design and distribution obligations (DDO), WealthO2 believes.
The regulation, which would commence on 5 October, would require providers and issuers of financial products to have adequate product governance frameworks to ensure their products are targeted at the right people.
WealthO2 said it created a series of features which would allow advisers to better manage risk. The first of these explored consolidated holdings and allowed the user to see the overall exposure by asset class or managed account and the individual securities within each one.
This would help advisers to identify if there was a client-wide need to rebalance portfolios as a result of investment strategy change or changing market conditions.
“In the wake of DDO, the ability of advisers to quickly slice data into higher risk asset classes, and to easily drill further into the holdings of clients or of the managed accounts that are recommending those assets, is more important than ever,” Shannon Bernasconi, WealthO2 managing director, said.
“The ability to quickly assess not only the dollar value of holdings, but also the number of entities invested in specific securities, can help in situations such as rights entitlement offers or other corporate actions, as the adviser can easily gauge how many investors are impacted.
Subsequent features would include an option for larger practices to search ‘by adviser’ and a user interface integration for bulk actions.
