Billing/Composites

• We have made updates that will improve the processing time within the Householding app in Orion Connect. This will allow advisors to work more efficiently when householding accounts.
• Advisors can now create financial planning fees separate from management fees at the Household level. Advisors can now set up specific pay methods, frequencies, schedules and payouts for financial planning fees. Orion’s integration with BluePay can be used to process Credit Card receivables.
• Orion has removed “External Account Activity In/Out” from being available as a billable transaction type for Cash Flow billing. This transaction type is used to “plug” account balances until the custodian provides the actual transactions. The actual transaction type could be a buy or sell. These are not billable transactions, thus should not be marked to be billed as cash flows.
• If an Advisor has sleeves and bills in arrears, this project will stop closed sleeves from appearing on the fee file. Instead, the fee of the closed fee will be rolled up into the custodial fee just like the fee on an active sleeve.
• In the Firm Profile app, Advisors will now have the ability to create their own custom billing adjustment types in Orion.
• When a Registration is sleeved in Orion, we will now have the ability to carry over previously established Account Level adjustments to the Custodial Account. This will allow our Advisors to save time during the sleeve billing setup process.
• The Bill Generator app now has an enhanced Bill Instance grid view which now supports date range filters.
• Advisor will be able to run composite reports for any time period of their choice, found under in the Composite app > Accounts > Actions > Report > Daily Composites, instead of just monthly time periods. The user can now see how their composite is performing mid-month as well as take it to Committee Meetings to show upper management how they are doing.
• The Composite Dashboard is a tool where the Advisor can do comparative analysis on composites. Advisors can compare an account’s performance against the overall composite group performance. This will help the Advisor determine whether the account should be included/excluded or whether it is in the right composite group.
• Composite descriptions can be added composite groups in the report setup in the composite app. These descriptions can then be printed out under Actions > Report > Composite Description to give to prospective clients, so that the prospective client can see and reference all of the composite groups the Advisor runs. This will also allow for Advisors to store the information at Orion for a one quick stop instead of having to store these outside of Orion.
• New filters are being added to the report setup screen in the Composite App > Reports. This will allow Advisors to get more granular in which accounts will be included in composite performance numbers. For example, the Advisor can exclude accounts will less than $10k in one report, but allow those same account that are less than $10k in another report. This will allow the Advisor to see how composite are performing with high level clients vs all clients.
• Two new fields (Funded & Bundled Fees) at the account level in Portfolio Audit > Account > Edit Account to give more details about how the account is managed being displayed in the composite account list. This will help Advisors filter accounts with these two new fields to help determine whether they should be included or not. Funded is for those accounts that are 100% funded and Bundle Fees is for those accounts that don’t know how the fees are split up, meaning fees are bundled into one fee.
• The new Wizard, found in the Composite App, will have a familiar feel and look like the other wizards in Orion, where the Advisor chooses the composite month(s) to run and whether they want to run it for all account, a management style, model, etc. The Wizard will also take the Portfolio Groups, accounts grouped together in the Households, and add it to the monthly composite account list. The Wizard will also run Composite Rules the Advisor has set up and exclude accounts on the front end.

 

Business Intelligence

• If you use the Trends application, Orion has added Broker/Dealer, Representative and Wholesaler filters to the Household Performance dashboard. This will allow for greater granularity while reviewing your data in Trends.
• Orion has built the ability to support multi-database viewing in Trends. This will allow firms that have more than one database connected to one another to have data from multiple databases pulled into one Trends view.
• If you are a user of Trends, Orion is bringing Advisors their Trends data more frequently. Orion will now load data into Trends on a weekly basis, instead of monthly. This will allow Advisors to access their data inside of Trends much sooner and allow business decisions and review of their business on a more frequent basis.

 

Integrations

• Orion Social now allows advisors to download attachments on a case (current or previous) providing additional transparency.
• We created a new user privilege called “Social Cases”, allowing you to enable or hide Cases in Orion Social. In User Roles, to remove access simply uncheck this privilege.
• Orion Social’s search feature now includes the same search capabilities as Orion Connect. Directly from Orion Social’s search, Advisors will now be able to navigate directly to a specific HH, Acct, Reg, Asset ID, application page, report, or query. The new search field will also pull back webinars, help docs, and other items in Orion Social.
• We corrected an issue with Wealth Access not loading in Insight while in the Client Portal. You can now successfully create a Wealth Access dashboard for Insight, and then deploy that to clients in the Client Portal.
• Orion has developed additional features to the Integration Center app to allow advisors to set up their own integrations. This is will now be in Open Beta you can enable this new app in your Manage Users app > Roles
• We have added a Single Sign On App for BlackRock’s iRetire platform. Advisors who have access to this platform can now launch this new app from the Orion Connect main menu.
• Orion has added a new data provider Newport Group to our account downloading capabilities. This provider will allow us to retrieve plan and participant level retirement account data (Transactions, Positions, Prices, Demographic data). We currently do not receive Cost Basis files from them at this time, but we are looking to add this in a future release.
• We have created a notification subscription that advisors can choose to enroll in that will alert them of ByAll accounts that have gone stale. This will run automatically each day helping advisors stay on top of these stale accounts to get them resolved. Advisors can subscribe by clicking on their name in Orion Connect in the upper right hand corner > Settings > Notifications > Stale Account Notification.
• Updated Trends user security to consider users with access to multiple databases. This will provide our Advisors who deploy multiple databases with the ability to view all at once inside Trends for comprehensive Business Intelligence.
• Orion has made an enhancement to the Salesforce integration where we now have the option to sync Account Trading Notes from Orion to Salesforce.  Advisors who use the Orion Connect app through Salesforce can choose to have this feature enabled which will sync over a note to the Salesforce “Notes & Attachment’s related list on the Financial Account object within Salesforce.  These notes will sync whenever an account is traded within Orion.  This allows the advisor to quickly see the last time the account was traded, what was traded, by whom, and the reason for the trade.  Contact the Integrations Team here at Orion to have this new feature enabled.

 

Portfolio Interaction

• Previously, when an e-mail was sent from Deliver, the “written by” would state “UNKNOWN”. Orion has changed this where the Advisor’s name for that client will now be shown so the client can see this information instead of Unknown.
• In the Mobile App, if a client user has access to more than 1 household the user can now switch between households within the mobile app. Previously, the user could only see their default household details within the mobile app.
• Three new fields have been added to the New Account Wizard’s Household/Registration tab- ‘Statement Delivery’, ‘Report Name’, and ‘Salutation’. This allows advisors to quickly populate these fields as part of creating a new household.
• Advisors can now update the Billing Status field on accounts within the Mass Edit features in both the Portfolio Audit & Billing Audit apps. This is located under Accounts > Actions > Edit Accounts > Billing category.
• Orion Social will be the default landing page for all newly created advisor level users going forward. Users can also change their default setting to Orion Connect or Insight if they choose.
• A new option has been added to the Client Portal called “Show Related Households”. If desired, advisors can toggle the setting to Off and related household details will no longer display on the left side panel in the Client Portal.
• The Rep Portal can now be set as the default landing page for Representative Level users. Advisors can navigate to the Firm Profile app > Options Information menu and set the option “Use Rep Portal as Landing for Reps” to True.
• A new setting has been added to the Client Portal called “Show Asset Level Holdings”. If desired, advisors can toggle the setting to Off and holdings will no longer display Client Portal.
• We now offer the ability to hide Employee Households from other users. To denote these types of Households in Orion Connect, navigate to the Household Editor > Category field, and assign the category of “Employee”. There is 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 Employee Households.

 

Reconciliation & Dashboards

• The Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) format now separates out the Buy and Accrued Interest transactions. Previously, these transactions were combined.
• Within a Rep Level Insight Dashboard, launching a portfolio, Insight will now open the portfolio level dashboard into a new browser tab rather than navigating you away from your existing Rep Level Dashboard. This allows you to easily switch back to your previous Rep Level dashboard tab for easier navigation.
• Orion now displays the name of the model on the Model Tolerance tile, allowing for easier model reference.
• Do you use Insight and custody accounts at TD Ameritrade? When using the TD Ameritrade VEO tile, Orion has added the ability inside of Insight to refresh just the VEO tile and not the entire dashboard. Advisors need the ability to see TD Ameritrade data in real time and that is what this tile provides!
• Inside of the Insight application, we have added a TWR disclaimer to the Performance Top 10 tile. This disclaimer can be edited by Advisors to include Advisor specific language.
• Orion now has the ability to consume Transactions, Positions, Prices, and Demographic files from Apex Clearing. The Cost Basis files are still being worked on and will not be available until late 1st quarter. Please contact the Integrations Support SME team to inquire about participating in the Apex data file BETA.
• Orion has now added an Unrealized Cost Basis to our Northern Trust Interface that is currently in BETA testing with Orion. Orion’s “gap fill” process will run and calculate the realized gain loss information between the receipt of monthly realized files.
• Do you love integrations within Insight? Orion and Hidden Levers have partnered to create a new Insight tile for Hidden Levers that displays a client’s Risk / Return score.
• If you get excited about Insight and want to integrate Riskalyze into your business, Orion and Riskalyze are now bringing the Riskalyze Retirement Map into Insight as a tile that can be used to transform your client presentations.
• Orion has made an update to the Interactive Brokers interface to automatically convert all foreign currency prices to USD. This update will provide more accurate and timely pricing which will lead to better activity reporting.
• Orion has added additional fields on the product table; allowing the advisor to enter estimated income. Future development, to be available in December, will allow estimated income for manual and alternative products and view on Orion reports.
• In the Products & Prices app, Orion has made Global taxability information viewable on the product level under the local settings section. The update will allow the advisor to easily view and override the product’s taxability settings.
• Inside of Insight, Orion is making a change to the performance line chart tile. Advisors will now be able to display different groupings and have a line item represent each account, management style, registration, etc. This will allow Advisors to display performance in a different range of abilities to help have a positive discussion around performance with clients.
• Inside of Insight, Orion has updated the Activity Summary tile to include the transaction type. Previously, Advisors would just see the transaction categories along with date and value. Now, we are actually going to detail out transaction types, dates, and values.
• Based on Advisor feedback, Orion has removed the Reports Tile from downloading with the presentation to PDF. This tile did not provide value when printing a presentation for a client.
• If you think Insight is as awesome as we do, check this out. Based on Advisor feedback, the portfolio selection ‘tree-view’ now includes portfolio groups and all accounts/registrations in one screen rather than tabbed out by ‘portfolio’ and ‘groups’.
• Inside of Insight, Orion has created a new Portfolio Summary tile. This tile will display current value, gain/loss, and performance information. This tile was created to make Advisors lives easier because Advisors can now have one tile rather than the need for multiple tiles to provide this information.
• Advisors will now have the ability to customize transaction categories inside of the Insight app to mirror what is available in the Report Builder app. This parameter will be available in the Activity Summary and Activity Compare tiles.
• Insight will now have read only and edit rights that can be enabled in the Manage Users app by your database administrator role. The new privilege is located under Records>Reporting>Insight. Advisors will now be able to give read only access to Representative level logins for Insight/client presentation purposes.

 

Report Outputs

• Advisors will now be able to run data queries on multiple databases based on setting up a database group. Previously, a selected data query would have to be run for each database separately.
• When using custom or user defined fields, you will now be able to track the data inputs as of any point in time. Advisors will now be able to audit and report on custom fields throughout time, not just based on what is currently in the custom field.
• When Advisors generate a data query which returns no data, the query output will now return the header row. Previously, a completely blank CSV/Excel document was created.
• When using Engage, due to changes with video storage on Vimeo’s side, Engage will no longer support URL video uploads through Vimeo. Orion will only support YouTube for URL uploads. We appreciate your understanding.
• Orion has built a new option in Report Builder titled “Include Blank Page After Cover.” This option will present itself after a cover page has been chosen. This option will create a blank page directly after the cover page. This allows firms who print out their reports to print double sided and not have the first page of the report output on the back of the cover page.

 

RMD

• We’ve created additional clarity on the transaction level for controlling what transactions are included toward satisfying the RMD requirement. All distribution transactions are automatically included, but for merge out/journal out transactions, you will now see two check boxes in the “Additional Information” section of the Transaction Editor- “system maintained” and “include as RMD distribution”- if the transaction has been included by the system, both boxes will be checked. If you wish to exclude/include a transaction manually, simply uncheck the “system maintained” box and make your selection.
• Orion has made a change to the logic for included registrations in the RMD Dashboard app. At the registration type edit screen inside of the Firm Profile app, the qualified check box for Registration Types will no longer be required to be selected. Simply make sure that for RMD eligible registration types, “include in RMD” is checked and you are good to go. You’ll also see a new box on this editor screen called “exclude from RMD aggregate”. This box gives you the ability to exclude accounts with certain registration types from RMD aggregation that occurs based on SSN. When the box is checked, the RMD for that account will only be satisfied if a distribution/merge out occurs directly in that account.
• We have made an enhancement to the RMD dashboard to provide a notification if another account has satisfied the RMD distribution when tied to another account for that client’s SSN. An additional field/column will be added to the RMD dashboard called “Satisfied by other account” so Advisors can quickly spot these situations. This allows Advisors to see that $0 has been distributed from an account but another account in the same portfolio has distributed enough to cover multiple accounts.
• The RMD Dashboard now has a database entity option that will allow for accrued interest to be included in the calculated 12/31 value. This option is titled ‘Include Accrued Interest in RMD 12/31 Values’ located in the Firm Profile app > Options Information menu
• Inside of our RMD Dashboard, Orion has created a job that will do all RMD calculation processing multiple times a day. This job will run at 10 am, 12 pm, and 2 pm CST every day. Previously, this would only occur overnight. This will allow for greater transparency and more timely data review as it pertains to RMD eligible accounts.
• Although the RMD Dashboard updates overnight and with the November release, we are updating that to run multiple times a day. Orion has also built a manual ‘Update RMD’ button under the ‘Actions’ dropdown inside of the RMD Dashboard. This will allow you as the Advisor to force an update after making any potential updates/changes to RMD eligible accounts.
• Orion has updated the RMD dashboard app to allow custom fields that are built out at the account level to be available to display inside of the RMD Dashboard. This allows Advisors that use custom fields for their own internal purposes to pull this data into the RMD dashboard.

 

Trading

• When using the RMD Dashboard app, Orion has created a “Cash Value” column. This column will pull in the total current value of all custodial cash assets. Custodial Cash assets are designated by marking the security as TRUE inside of the Products & Prices application. This ”Cash Value” column allows Advisors to view all cash available from sweep and money market positions in RMD eligible accounts.
• Within the Models app, you can now select multiple models and delete en masse. To delete a particular model, it cannot have any accounts assigned to it, or be a part of a model aggregate that has accounts assigned to it.
• A new Insight tile for Eclipse™ will allow the user to assign a model to a portfolio, run a rebalance on a portfolio, raise cash for a distribution request and allow for individual buys and sells on accounts. Actions taken from the tile will be pushed to Eclipse™ where trades will be created and reviewed by the firm’s Eclipse™ user for execution. This is a great widget in Insight to allow a rep user to be able to do simple requests without having to give access to Eclipse™.
• Orion has made a slight tweak to the additional RMD options in the Transaction editor. If the Advisor maintained box is checked, user will be allowed to edit the transaction 1) Check the “include in RMD distribution” box and a previously unchecked transaction will now be included towards the RMD 2) Uncheck “include in RMD Distribution” and that transaction will no longer be accounted for when reviewing satisfied RMD amount
• For those firms trading sleeves through FIX within TOM, the FIX 4.4 mutual fund batch wizard has been updated to properly account for any overlap of positions between sleeves. Those sleeve journals will now occur as expected and a net transaction will be sent to the custodian.
• For those firms trading at Guggenheim (Rydex), an updated Guggenheim (Rydex) trade file is now built out to the latest specifications.
• When using sleeves, registrations can no longer be marked inactive if there are any active sleeves in the registration. The registration must be unsleeved prior to marking the registration inactive.
• The TD Ameritrade trade file has been updated for the tax lot depletion methods. The ‘Use Assigned’ Tax Method will now return blank on the trade file, which will instruct TD Ameritrade to use the default method set on the account at TDA. Additional Tax Methods available, which can be set by product are FIFO, LIFO, etc.
• When cancelling sleeves, a change has been implemented for situations where an account number is too long to add the _CNX to the end of it, the system will reduce the number of characters to be able to add the required _CNX.
• To avoid issues when using sleeves, you will no longer be able to remove a model from a sleeved account. If a model/sleeve needs to be removed, the sleeve will need to be cancelled.
• In TOM, an enhancement to allow a larger number of orders to be deleted at once has been added. When done on the Orders grid, those orders can be deleted without running into any errors due to those larger amounts.
• When trading through FIX in TOM, the processing of manual orders is being adjusted. When orders are created in a manual process, when they go to a block, they will go into a New status, which will prevent it from being sent through FIX.
• In TOM, the Block editor window has been expanded to allow all of the fields to fit into it without needing to scroll down.
• Update to allow for the Trade Queue app grids to be exportable. This will allow for contributions or registration rebalances to be exported for additional or future reference.
• When using sleeves, the management style assigned to the model will be automatically assigned to the sleeve when the model is chosen. In Sleeve Setup, the management style will automatically populate once the model is picked.
• Within the Model app, the option to filter out inactive accounts in the ‘Assigned Accounts’ section of model aggregates has been added. When accessing the page, inactive accounts will automatically be filtered out, but those that are inactive can be displayed as well if chosen.
• In Model Aggregates, a model allocation will be available when reviewing a model aggregate. By hovering over the specific base model within the aggregate, the target allocations of that model will pop up.
• Optimized the Trade to Target % tool in TOM. The tool will allow for larger imports to be used to trade a larger number of accounts.
• Added a number of enhancements to the Model Tolerance tool in TOM and Portfolio Audit to make it similar to the version available in Advisor Desktop. The option to switch between current and pending values and to export the table are now available. In addition, the full product name and minimum cash settings have been added as choices to the grids.

 

WOW Reports

• Orion is making the Trades by Product report available in TOM. This will allow Advisors to generate this report directly from within TOM and you will not have to navigate to the Reports application.

 

 

0434-OAS-11/10/2017