An ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. Godzilla battling King Kong. Bowie and Jagger, together at last. Sometimes things that are great on their own become extraordinary when you add a complementary partner.
You know Orion as the premier provider of innovative financial technology, investment, and support solutions. How do you complement technology to help advisors of all business models? You add access to cash management and lending alternatives for personal, business and nonprofit needs.
A Welcome Combination
Orion recently partnered with Focus Client Services (FCS) to help advisors create a centralized, more cohesive financial journey for their clients. Advisors can compete with private banks and wirehouses from an-industry first fully integrated solution.
This exciting open-architecture based integration enables advisors to leverage FCS:
- Lending & Cash Management Capabilities, including access to a range of FDIC-insured deposit programs at competitive rates for clients’ portfolio cash and held-away cash balances, as well as securities-backed and insurance premium finance lines of credit, commercial and business loans, residential and commercial mortgages, and air and watercraft financing.
- An Experienced Service Team, with more than 125 years of collective banking expertise, offering a high touch, interpersonal service model designed to engage, educate, and guide advisors and their clients through the entire lending and deposit life cycle, particularly in times of market volatility.
- Confidentially and Protection of Client Relationships, through lending and deposit programs, reviewed and delivered by a network of vetted and tested partners that are bound by regulatory privacy and data security standards.
An Exceptional Enhancement
The Orion/FCS partnership offers a robust end-to-end experience for both advisors and investors, all within the sleek and redesigned Orion experience. Advisors will be able to kick off new loan requests automatically, manage these loans within the Orion Client Portal, connect these loans to an investor’s financial plan via Orion Planning, and monitor the loan and showcase its value as an asset or liability through Orion’s custom and dynamic reporting capabilities.
Add To Your Advisor Value
This partnership is great news for investors—and even more so for advisors. By leveraging FCS, advisors can expect:
- Increased Client Retention: Providing more comprehensive financial services for clients creates increased loyalty and greater stickiness for advisors, leading to higher retention rates.
- Ability to Compete on a Larger Scale: Advisors competing with big banks for business are now armed with a powerful equalizer in the ability to offer competitive banking and cash management services.
- Attract and Serve High-Net-Worth Clients: Known for their complex needs, high-net-worth clients value concierge services such as banking and cash management from their financial advisors.
The Final Piece: You
Ready to start offering your clients unparalleled service and exclusive lending options, all from Orion’s award-winning interface? Watch our special on-demand webinar detailing the Orion/FCS partnership. It’s as satisfying as adding chocolate to milk.
0427-OAT-02/05/2021
Wrap It Up With Orion: 6 Tips to Relieve End-of-Year StressHoliday bills. Covid. Year-end work. Hearing “Wonderful Christmastime” for the millionth time. Is it any wonder the end of 2020 is one of the more anxiety-ridden times in recent memory?
Well, take a deep breath. We’re here for you. This week, we offer the first part of our year-end stress relief articles. It’s the end of the quarter, and the end of the year for your business. In addition to normal personal stressors, you probably have plenty to worry about in the office (actual or virtual).
One of Orion’s main goals is to offer you a simple, clean, and use user-friendly experience. We have been diligently working for months now to improve speed and efficiency, and give you the best possible tools for your business. Here, we offer six simple solutions to year-end stress:
Reporting
Create a test Report Batch with the Report you’ll be using for year end Statements. This will highlight any issues that might need to be addressed either on the Report or in Client’s Households / Accounts before actual Statements are run. As long as you don’t change the Viewable Setting to Household in the Batch, the reports will not be visible to the Clients.
Go to: Reporting > Report Batches
Performance
Get ahead of the year end craziness by reviewing performance YTD before they leave for any holiday break and again as soon as you’re back. Kick off a sample performance batch and make sure everything is in order and looks presentable.
Products and Prices
One of the quickest issues to solve at quarter-end is to make sure that all products have an Asset Class assigned so allocations will be correct on reports. Search for products missing Asset Classes before it crops up in other areas.
Go to: Products & Prices>> Maintenance >> Missing Asset Classes
Billing
Running Forecast Bills and utilizing the Cash Funding Tool will help you start the new year off right and get a head start on quarterly processing. These tools help review calculations and make sure accounts hold enough cash before running live bills. You should also utilize the features in the Payout Dashboard which will show how much is being paid to individual reps.
Data Reconciliation
The Asset Comparison Report (ACR) should be run on a monthly basis. The ACR is a report that contains a list of accounts & assets that have a value in Orion but have dropped off the Custodial data feed and are no longer downloading to Orion. Also, be sure to review the Accounts Not Downloading, Accounts Downloading on the Exclusion List and Placeholder Transaction Audits within the Recon Status application.
Cost Basis
You’ll want to review Tax Lot Audits to find out if any overrides need to be put in. Review each section to prevent errors down the line.
Go to: Tax Center > Tax Lot Audits
Hopefully, these tips will help you use Orion to its fullest potential, as well as lift your spirits. To see how Orion is preparing for 2021, watch our special video, “Morning Will Come Again” below. As for hearing terrible Christmas songs over and over, we have one last recommendation: turn off the radio until January.
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SEC audits are a lot like the holidays: they’re coming whether you’re ready or not. At this time of year, it isn’t just Santa who has gift-giving on his mind. But unwrapping the rules and regulations around gifting clients can be a ho-ho-hum ordeal.
Checking It Twice
In FY 2019, 15% of SEC-registered investment advisers were audited, and the OCIE issued more than 2,000 deficiency letters. One of the most commonly cited infractions involved advisors not following compliance policies and procedures. This includes lack of performing internal practice reviews, and non-adherence to practices related to employee expenses and gift-giving.
Most financial firm policies restrict or require disclosures on offering or receiving gifts. Before an adviser can give or take a gift, they must report it to the firm’s compliance department. But where is this information kept at your firm—if it’s logged at all?
The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Orion was born from the desire to help advisors work more efficiently. In addition to our mission of presenting a superior user experience and cutting-edge technology, we work hard so you don’t have to. The latest weapon in our fight against inefficiency and hassle: Inform.
Powered by your Orion data, our robust compliance capabilities enable you to face regulatory obligations head on. Many firms rely on tracking gift-giving manually—taking up valuable time and resources. When that audit hits (and it will!) they are often caught unprepared. Inform offers an automated, easy-to-use tool to ensure your compliance standards are always ready. It’s like the perfect gift, all tied up with a bow.
Stocking Stuffers
Inform helps you take a three-sided approach and stay on the right side of compliance:
- Regulatory Audit Preparation: Build regularly-scheduled compliance queries, conduct routine audits to verify compliance with internal policies, and Respond to requests from the SEC and state regulators quickly and accurately.
- Proactive Oversight and Protection: Aggregate and view 13F filing reports and Form ADV reporting information, deliver reports to an SFTP location of your choice, and Screen clients automatically against anti-money laundering lists with an optional LexisNexis-integrated service.1
- Employee Trade Monitoring: Monitor employee trade activity with access to 1000+ custodians, track approvals and rejections of gifts and outside business activities, and automate frontrunning reviews to further protect your firm.
Adding Inform to Orion’s built-in compliance capability gives you a comprehensive approach to eliminate outsourcing costs, reduce the risk of data breaches, and stay confident you’re avoiding potential regulatory violations.
And To All a Good Night
Whether your current compliance efforts are naughty or nice, your firm could benefit from adding Inform to your tech stack. Find out how 62% of clients complete compliance tasks faster with Orion.2
Contact us today for your very own Inform demo, or watch our on-demand webinar to see Inform in action.
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1Integration with LexisNexis required
2Tech Validate – TVID: EB6-EE5-CB0
3279-OAS-12/04/2020
Orion Experience Improvements Continue: New App Icons and Accessibility OptionsAs part of Orion’s mission to simplify and streamline our software, you will notice new app icons on your dashboard, and improved accessibility options. In advance of a larger user experience refresh in 2021, these app icons and accessibility options can serve as a small preview of what’s to come.
Refreshed and Color-Coded App Icons
After receiving user feedback, we have refreshed our icons with a clean new look. Every app you’re accustomed to using is still available, and those you saved as a “Favorite” won’t change. But you will now be able to find and group apps more efficiently than before. We hope that you will discover apps you may have missed before and discover new ways to use Orion Connect.
For a reference guide, click here.
New Accessibility Options
Complying with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines helps ensure that our platform is accessible to all people, especially those with certain physical disabilities. We are implementing a tool that automates accessibility standards quickly and efficiently. We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing technology that is accessible to the widest possible audience. Users can choose from several predefined profiles or they can pick the specific accessibility options they wish to enable.
For a reference guide, click here.
What do users have to do?
Nothing! The app icons will update and accessibility options will go live by early next week. Your “Favorites” will remain in their place, and every app will remain available.
What’s next?
These refreshed icons and accessibility options were a direct result of customer feedback, and our goal of offering you the greatest user experience possible. Be on the lookout in 2021 as we update the entire Orion Connect experience for more functionality and ease of use.
If you’re not an Orion client yet, what are you waiting for? We’d love to show you around with a demo.
3017-OAS-11/10/2020