Envestnet, Inc. (NYSE: ENV) announces that it is teaming up with SIMON Markets LLC in order to provide access to, and the management of structured investments that can offer income and protection strategies for customer portfolios.
As mentioned in the announcement, Envestnet’s integration plan should make it possible for financial advisors utilizing Envestnet’s financial wellness ecosystem and unified managed account (UMA) platform to provide structured investments “as fee-based solutions—and seamlessly manage these products across their lifecycle using analytics, education, and portfolio allocation tools from SIMON.”
Tom Sipp, Group Head of Envestnet Solutions, stated:
“With income and protection becoming even more critical for a diversified portfolio, we continue to forge ties with partners who can bring advisors greater access to these types of investment strategies. SIMON’s innovative technology and analytics simplifies accessibility and the facilitation of complex structured investments, annuities, and other income and protection products for advisors and their clients’ portfolios—empowering the Envestnet ecosystem to help more people experience an intelligently connected financial life.”
The integrations between Envestnet and SIMON should give advisors “the capability to place structured investments in UMAs, which are a key component of many broker-dealers’ fee-based businesses,” the announcement noted.
Jason Broder, CEO of SIMON, remarked:
“Advisors make a lot of decisions for their clients every day, and in a very complementary way, SIMON and Envestnet are focused on making it easier for advisors to help clients reach their goals. Envestnet’s extensive suite of tools gives advisors a clear 360-degree view of client finances. We’re bringing structured investments to an advisor’s suite of fee-based solutions for the first time, with powerful portfolio construction analytics designed to help reach a client’s investment objectives.”
The SIMON Spectrum portfolio allocation analytics feature has been specifically developed to assist advisors with assessing whether or not structured investments and annuity products may help with aligning customers’ investment objectives to “achieve their financial goals.”
The announcement further explained that this particular capability will be integrated into Envestnet’s proposal generation tool—”enabling advisors to include structured investments in model portfolios.”
SIMON Spectrum carries out analysis on alternative solutions like structured investments and annuities using five different criteria: protection, upside, liquidity, simplicity, and history.
In addition to allowing advisors to incorporate structured investments into proposals, Envestnet’s integration with SIMON will:
- Make it possible to seamlessly go from proposal to implementation and execution through SIMON’s platform and order entry tools. SIMON offers access to—and analytical features for evaluating—structured investment, annuity, and defined outcome exchange-traded fund (ETF) solutions.
- Deliver all post-trade data in real time, enabling advisors to actively manage their structured investment books of business in one centralized location, including integrating SIMON’s structured investment data to include in client reporting.
- Offer multimedia educational resources to help advisors and their clients better understand structured investment products, such as:
- A growing library of 90+ educational videos.
- On-demand, comprehensive asset class education for all advisor experience levels.
- Customized compliance-tracking and supervisory tools to help advisors navigate self-paced certification requirements and deliver real-time oversight for home offices.
For more details on this announcement, check here.