The next Orion software update is coming your way on August 19. Get ready with release highlights in today’s post.

TRADING

With the release of Eclipse™, Orion’s next generation trading platform, right around the corner, the Trading team has been working hard to make sure it’s ready to go.

However, there are some other exciting items being pushed out with our current technology release. The biggest of those items is the ability to create fractional equity trades. With this functionality, equity trades won’t be limited to only being bought or sold in a whole share. Since most executing brokers still require shares to be done in a whole amount, this can be enabled by custodian.

For firms trading at Raymond James, a new trade file is being built out. You will now be able to create a file to input directly into Raymond James’ system for those trades to be executed.

For clients using sleeves, a Distribution import has been released. You will now be able to import a list of accounts and amounts that need to take a distribution.

The Trading team has also released a ‘Covered Call’ tool that will allow you to buy or sell covered calls based off a round lot of shares owned in a client account. When shares are purchased or sold, you can access the tool via the Closed tab in TOM. The system will pre-determine the amount of calls that need to be purchased or sold based off the number of shares. For example, if you purchased 550 shares of a ticker, you could sell 5 covered calls.  To go along with this, we have built out a Think Pipes trade file to upload those trades to the custodian.

BILLING

SCHWAB INTEGRATION

Orion has developed Direct Fee File processing capability with Schwab. This WILL remove the need for you to manually download your fee files from Orion and manually upload into Schwab. Efficiency, baby!

BILLING GENERATOR app

You can now generate your Fee Files by Custodian. This feature allows you to generate bills on all households in one instance and then allows you to separate your fee files by Custodian.

BILLING AUDIT app

You can now give Representative Level users access to the Billing Audit app. This will allow your Reps to only see their households and accounts within this app and perform many of the same actions as Advisor Level users.

TRENDS

We have added three new dashboards in the New/Closed folder for Household, Registration, and Account level data in regards to new and closed metrics for these areas. (Number of Accounts as well as AUM)

We have also spent time working to upgrade the performance and reliability of the app as a whole. We’ve added more mice to the wheel and you should notice some nice improvements with stability and performance.

MARKET DATA

MORNINGSTAR API DEVELOPMENT

We’re expanding the available asset classification data by offering sector, industry group, industry, and style box information for global securities in addition to the domestic securities currently offered. Region/Country information for securities will be available on select reports as well.

PRODUCTS and PRICES app

ADVISOR MAINTAINED PRODUCTS

Advisor Maintained Products allow you to set up your own manually-maintained securities in Orion, rather than submitting a case and waiting for Orion to set them up. Securities will be set up with unique symbols that can be chosen by you, but will be prefixed with a code specific to your firm. New securities set up will be immediately available and also automatically enabled to allow the import of advisor-provided prices through the local price table.

Securities with industry symbols (Tickers and CUSIPs) will still need to be set up by Orion.

COMPOSITES app

Supervision Grid

The Supervision Grid will compare accounts within a strategy against a benchmark, using risk statistics, to see if there are any outliers.

REPORTING apps

ATTRIBUTION

Orion is rolling out Brinson Fachler Macro Attribution calculations. You will first see this inside of Insight, Orion’s interactive client presentation tool. We will also be expanding Orion’s reporting capabilities to include these new attribution calculations as well.

INSIGHT

Within Insight on any Performance tile, you will see a new pop-out option that will bring you to a larger screen from that tile. This new screen will provide a deeper dive into performance information and comparisons to risk measurements. Finally, you will see an Attribution section to help provide answers as to why a portfolio is performing the way it is (example: if your portfolio is performing well based on market growth or security selection).

WEALTH ACCESS INTEGRATION

The Insight platform will now host Wealth Access’ Household level tiles. These new Wealth Access Insight Tiles include a full Balance Sheet, Portfolio Diversification, Biggest Changes, Accounts List, Historical Net Worth, Historical Cash Flow, Holdings List, Holdings Historical Values, Accounts Summary, and Recent Banking Activity views.

RISKALYZE INTEGRATION

Today in Insight there is a Tile that shows the Riskalyze portfolio Risk Number. This Tile is now enhanced to show you the Portfolio, Client, and Target risk numbers from Riskalyze, allowing you to compare and build conversations around these scores with your client, right from Orion’s Insight app!

REPORT BUILDER

Report Builder will now support the ability to assign versions of reports by Representative instead of having to assign each client report individually.

PORTFOLIO GROUPS

Our previous release introduced Portfolio Groups as a grouping option maintained in the ‘Edit Household’ screen. With the August release, we are extending this grouping functionality to our Client Portal and Insight applications!

INTEGRATIONS

INTEGRATIONS CENTER…COMING SOON!

At our Fuse conference this year, we are taking on the task of building out a new Orion Integrations Center App. All things integrations will be here.

You will be able to learn about our integrations, watch videos and tutorials about what the integrations have to offer, and even set up the integration all from our new Integrations Center app! We expect to release the first version of this new app by the end of September, so get ready!

COMING SOON!

HIDING EMPLOYEE HOUSEHOLDS

Orion is working on new development to provide you the ability to hide Employee type households from your users. To denote these types of Households in Orion Connect, navigate to the Household Editor > Category field, assign the category of “Employee”. There will be a new privilege called “Employee Households” within the Manage Users app > Roles. Simply uncheck this privilege within your Roles and those users assigned to the Role will no longer have access to view the Households assigned to the Category of “Employee” within Orion Connect. This functionality will be releasing the weekend of September 16!

The next Orion software update releases on Saturday, August 19. Please follow status.https://oriontechno.wpengine.com and @OrionAssist on Twitter for technical updates as the software update rolls out to our users.

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Last month, we released our May 2017 software update. In this post, we’ll highlight three of that build’s new features: Compliance Corner, Composite updates, and Moody’s.

Updated data queries, new Composite features, and Moody’s ratings are just a few additions that will  streamline your processes.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Get Out of the  Corner with These Updates

The Compliance Corner app now boasts tabs for easier navigation and workflow. Under the Form ADV tab, you’ll find a list of data queries you can run, helping you populate required information in your Form ADV.

We also included an updated query list to accommodate 2017 Form ADV reporting changes.

To make sure the queries provide the information you’re looking for, review the data queries to ensure you’re using the correct corresponding data fields. And remember, you can request a new data query from Orion if you need data more specific to your needs and can’t find a match to your liking already in our list.

Creating Magic with Composites

Our new update includes several changes to the Composite app.

If you’ve logged into the Composite app in recent weeks, the first change you likely noticed is its new landing page. The first pie chart you’ll see displays AUM by Model and Management Style, and a second pie chart displays the number of accounts by Model and Management Style.

You also have a table showing Model and Management Style period performance, Quarter-to-date, Year-to-date, 1 Year, 3 Years, 5 Years, 10 Years, and Since Inception performance.

Each chart or table allows you to view the accounts making up those numbers.

Now, let’s wrap up composites with two more quick updates.

Previously, you had to “make live” your entire preliminary composite account list. Now, you can choose one or multiple accounts to make live, and view the rest of your accounts in the preliminary account list.

And lastly, the “merge in/out filter” shows all the accounts that had a merge in/out transaction during a given time period. Now you can enter a percentage to only show those accounts with merge in/out transactions greater than that percentage.

Getting into the Reporting Mood(y’s)

Recently, Orion integrated with Moody’s to provide advisors with automatically updated Moody’s Investors Service bond ratings directly in the Orion platform. Ratings are automatically updated and can be added to Orion fixed income reports, giving you a clear sense of risk associated with a portfolio.

You can also opt to have Moody’s bond ratings included automatically in your Orion reports by signing an addendum to your Orion agreement.

This article is part of a series that reviews new features in our recent software update. If you’d like to see a list of every change made, you can read the full release notes here.

If you have any questions about today’s information, please log into Orion Social to contact our Subject Matter Expert teams.

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For a lot of people, texting has taken over as the main mode of communication in their daily lives. Anyone under thirty can attest that when you’re using your smartphone to talk to another person, nine times out of ten it’s done through text instead of a phone call.

Texting has become so important to us, that we feel it should be just as important a piece of the advisor-client relationship. That’s why we’ve developed the ability for you to enable text updates with your clients for checking their portfolio information and scheduling meetings with you.

Set Up

When you log into Orion Connect, you’ll now see a Notifications app with the Beta tag applied. (If you don’t see it, call up or email your Advisor Success Advocate to have the app enabled for you.)

Once you’re in the Notifications app, you’ll have two options on the left-side menu: My Subscriptions and Client SMS Settings.

My Subscriptions allows you to set up your own text alerts. We won’t cover that in this week’s blog, but keep your eyes open for it to appear as a Tech Tip in one of our Orion Weekly videos.

For now, click on Client SMS Settings. On this page, you’ll define the client texting experience.

Choose which data you’d like clients to receive in their texts. You can allow clients to request balance information, performance, required minimum distributions, and meetings with you.

Notifications takes the best parts of the Client Portal and puts them inside a text.

The customization doesn’t stop there, though. You can set a short performance disclosure to send along with texts containing performance returns. Remember, it’s a text, so “short” is what you’re working with here. One-hundred and forty characters and under is preferred.

Once a client registers, you can also set up an automatic welcome message.

How Your Clients Get Set

Your clients sign up for texts just as easily as you enable the ability for them.

Here’s how.

Once your clients log into the Orion Client Portal, they’ll click on their user name in the top right and then User Profile.

From there, clients click on the Notifications tab, enter their phone number, and then confirm their number with a unique PIN. The client will receive a welcome message telling them the codes to text to receive their updates, based on the settings you chose for what you want them to receive.

How It Works for Clients

Ater a client chooses to join your text update club, they’ll receive some additional instructions telling them the short codes they need to get their on-demand updates.

Here’s the full list of codes they can use, depending on which you choose to enable:

BAL = Portfolio Balance

PERF = Performance

ADV = Advisor Contact Info

RMD = Required Min. Distribution

MEET = Schedule a meeting

When a client texts one of these codes back to the number that welcomes them to Notifications, they’ll receive back that information, like so:

But Notifications doesn’t stop there. Your clients can also set up Subscriptions, so they don’t have to remember to ask for updates.

Back on the Notifications tab under User Profile, clients can click “Subscribe” on the options you’ve allowed. From there, they can choose to receive an automatic update, whenever they want.

And now you’ve got all the information you need to get started with the new Notifications app and texting alerts in Orion Connect.

If you have any questions, please contact your Advisor Success Advocate.