This is why we decided to develop our own solution, Omniview, to address the needs and concerns of a specialised clientele.
Whilst we have been enthusiastic users of IT to support our own back office and investment management, we felt that none of the packages available commercially produced information in the way in which our clients were asking for it to be presented:
• An aggregated view of all of their assets, liabilities and investments.
• A clear breakdown of asset classes across all of their investments.
• A summary which enabled their individual investment managers to be benchmarked and monitored.
For a few years, we had been creating bespoke reports for clients, attempting to present individual data in a format they found meaningful.
From experience we found that for families, as wealth increases so too does the complexity and time required to maintain and administer a growing portfolio of assets and investments. Properly co-ordinated tax and estate planning can be time consuming without prompt and convenient access to key data and documentation such as wills, trust wordings, and tax returns.
Increasingly, we have seen a growing expectation that information can be made available via the internet, allowing access whenever required.
Perhaps the most challenging request from clients has been the wish to have the total aggregation of all of their financial affairs in a single place, in one integrated report. Whilst it has been possible, using automated data feeds, to value certain investments relatively easily, we recognised that clients wished to include arrangements that would not fit neatly into a fully automated reporting system.
The majority of our family office clients are “multi banked” and there was no way in which any one of these individual institutions would offer a consolidated overview of the totality of a family’s affairs via their own reporting platforms. Clients also wanted to be able to include details of private equity investments, self directed execution only investments, and investments with institutions such as National Savings & Investments which would not be capable of easily being held on automated platforms.
A further frustration with much of the off-the-shelf investment management software was that whilst very detailed information might be available regarding the performance of specific investments, there was very little relating this directly to a client’s own goals and objectives. Reporting was largely about the money, rather than the individual family, their strategy and the reasons why they had implemented specific solutions.
In seeking to act as adviser to our family office clients we recognised that much of what we were involved in on a day to day basis might best be described as a combination of project manager and administrator of client affairs.
We recognised that clients often found it tiresome to have to organise and maintain their own filing system and would find it helpful to have access to key documents and data from a wide variety of locations both in the UK and abroad.
We also wanted to be able to share with clients our progress on working on their affairs, so we could manage together key tasks and priorities.
In short we wanted to provide a client with a 360 degree of their affairs, via a web based “dashboard” capable of presenting information in a format and style which was meaningful to the lay person, rather than an investment specialist. A format which could allow the dashboard to be bespoke for individual families, providing the content they needed and the level of sophistication appropriate to their particular needs.
We developed Omniview to contain a diary section that can be viewed both by the client and the Fry Family Office team. The Profile and Planning sections include a clear statement of the clients’ objectives, their investment strategy and the rationale underlying the solutions we have implemented.
The Performance section includes portfolio reporting, and whilst we have included a facility to benchmark and risk grade individual investments, we have deliberately ensured the client reporting is not unnecessarily complex.
A decision we made at any early stage was to recognise that the system had to be capable of storing reports from other software programmes, many of which would provide a degree of depth and sophistication we would not wish to try and emulate in our own programme.
This enables us to be able to take reports from individual investment managers and make these available via a single portal, reducing the need for clients to have to spend time sourcing this information themselves. It also enables us to provide reports of greater complexity where we feel it is appropriate to the clients’ understanding and interest in the performance of their portfolio.
Having our own aggregation tool enables us to be able to transact for clients at the most competitive terms we can source on the market, without being tied to the platform costs determined by an external wrap provider.
The document storage facilities in our Perspectives module allow clients to have instant access, wherever they have an online connection, to key personal and business documents. Their wills, tax returns, important travel documents, and whatever documentation an individual family may find helpful. To date we have included documents as a varied as copies of insurance certificates, lists of directorships, copies of annual accounts for clients’ businesses, car registration documents, even children’s school reports.
At a time when clients are getting increasingly accustomed to being able to have information available instantly via an iPhone or Blackberry, we feel it is vital we have a web based portal which is genuinely client centric. None of this is a substitute for face to face personal contact or maintaining close working relationships but it is considerably more efficient and accessible than traditional paper based formats.
Omniview relies on having a team of appropriately skilled client managers and administrators who are able to update the relevant content. None of this is easy, or magically efficient. However, it does provide our clients with the combination of service and accessible information we believe are increasingly important to support families in their decision making and the stewardship of their wealth.
Our system relies on having a team of appropriately skilled client managers. We believe it is an exciting and innovative step towards answering the challenge of providing wealth management for the Blackberry generation.
