New portal and Apex Clearing integration meet the rising demand for one-stop, go-anywhere access to investors’ complete financial picture
Orion Advisor Solutions, the premier provider of the tech-enabled fiduciary framework that empowers financial advisors to Prospect, Plan, Invest, and Achieve within a single, connected experience, today unveils a new Orion Client Portal: a single destination for investors to reach their advisors and control their entire financial landscape. Built on the foundation of Orion Planning’s intuitive user interface, the new Orion Client Portal greatly expands the tools available to investors, who can now interact with their financial plans and track their investment performance without shuttling back and forth between clashing portals.
As Orion evolved beyond its roots as a portfolio management tech provider, they saw a clear need for a new standard in investor-advisor engagement — one made all the more urgent by the demands of remote work, said Eric Clarke, founder and CEO of Orion.
“We built our legacy portal to support our core mission at the time,” Clarke said. “It is still a robust, white-labeled solution for investors to see their key portfolio and investment information. But when we acquired Advizr’s powerful planning tools and user interface in the summer of 2019, we understood our mission had expanded to encompass a more complete fiduciary process. A year later, we’re proud to reveal a new portal that brings together everything an investor needs and expects from their advisor.”
Orion will continue to offer many of the same features included in its legacy portal, which grants investor access to Orion’s investment management solutions, including performance reports, balance sheets, and details on portfolio accounts. But now, the new Orion Client Portal adds a next-generation user interface, access to financial planning tools, account aggregation, custodial services, a digital vault of key documents, and other expanded features.
The union of these features creates a uniquely powerful relationship-building tool for advisors. Many of these vital functions are traditionally scattered across multiple portals with cluttered interfaces and hard-to-find resources. The status quo of multiple portals contributes to low engagement and login fatigue, with overall portal adoption barely reaching 10-12%.
“In today’s remote service world, digital first impressions matter,” said Hussain Zaidi, Orion’s chief strategy officer. “But advisors struggle to offer coherent service when investors are forced to juggle multiple portals just to understand their complete financial picture. Advisors can no longer settle for an archaic, fragmented collection of portals that hamstring client engagement and frustrate new prospects.”
In fact, during the height of 2020’s market volatility, Orion saw a 20% increase in portal logins. As the industry rapidly adopts digital service, advisory firms rightly prioritize client experience as the most vital part of their technology.
Creating a Fully Integrated, Tech-Enabled Advisor-Client Journey
For Orion, this most recent tech release presents a tremendous opportunity to further elevate the functionality of, and most importantly, the connectivity between, the tools and resources advisors rely on every day to engage their clients and power their growth. Each pillar of Orion’s Prospect, Plan, Invest, and Achieve framework is fully supported by their industry-leading technology solutions and platform insights. But it’s the Client Portal that runs the thread of connectivity through the entire process, providing the foundation for a strong advisor-client relationship from the start and building upon that initial dynamic experience with technology that empowers trust, transparency, access, and achievement:
Prospect: A running start for new clients with Market*r
The Orion Client Portal now ties to the Market*r digital marketing campaign platform, giving advisors early insights into a prospect’s needs through connectivity to Orion Planning, allowing investors to self-register on the tech through custom, goal-based workflows.
Plan: Defining goals quickly with Orion Planning
Now, with new accounts in place, investors can immediately engage with Orion Planning. A far cry from the antiquated, root-canal style of building financial plans, Orion’s software helps clients articulate, update, and track the financial goals that are relevant to them right away. It’s a dynamic, collaborative process that lays the groundwork for the next stages of the advisor-client relationship.
Invest: Custom-tailored investment management
Further enabling this process is the new Client Portal’s connection to Orion’s risk tolerance assessment, which facilitates a foundational first step in the investment process and supports more informed decision-making by exploring clients’ unique time horizon, investment goals, and market attitudes. From there, advisors can leverage Orion’s Element technology to search through existing financial plan data, filter by client goals and account information, saving them time when building a proposal and, ultimately, connecting investment strategies and solutions directly to investors’ unique goals and appetite for risk.
Beyond this, Orion’s new, direct integration with Apex makes opening and funding new accounts the work of minutes, eliminating the need to wait for signatures and physical forms. This self-guided, digital account opening process takes place within the same portal investors use to understand and control the rest of their financial needs, making it easier for advisors and clients to get started right away. To learn more, join an upcoming Orion and Apex webinar on Aug. 6.
Achieve: Sharing an advisor’s value proposition through personalized reporting
Beyond this, Orion’s dynamic reporting capabilities are pulled into the Orion Client portal, allowing clients to dig deeper into their financial health and future goals with access to their balance sheets, reports, quarterly performance statements, documents, and more — all while showing investors what their advisor is doing for them.
“One of the biggest advantages advisors can bring to the marketplace right now is a coordinated access point for a client’s entire financial and investment landscape,” Zaidi said. “The new Orion Client Portal connects and unifies every stage of the advisor-client relationship: building trust and transparency with prospects, expressing investors’ goals through financial planning, and forging a clear link between those goals and individualized investment strategies. It is a proven process, and we’re excited to see it embodied in the tech-enabled framework we have created for advisors on our platform.”
