Private investors expect their advisors to look at their financial lives from a holistic perspective. They want financial planning and investment advice that is grounded in an understanding of their life goals, their family situations, their appetite for risk, and their comfort with different types of investments. Delivering this complete wealth picture takes a lot of data and a variety of technology tools. And increasingly, it is a competitive necessity in order to engender client confidence and loyalty across generations.
Early in the evolution of the Black Diamond Wealth Platform, we made a strategic decision to build the best portfolio management, accounting and reporting platform and to partner with other technology providers to deliver complementary solutions to enhance an advisory firm’s tech-stack. We had some key criteria in developing our partner program. First, our partners had to be exceptionally good at what they did, with reputations that preceded them in the advisor marketplace. And secondly, we wanted it to be extremely easy for our clients to access and use these solutions, without having to juggle multiple systems and vendors. That meant developing tight, deep and virtually seamless integrations between our partners and our platform. This is why we are honored to feature Advizr, SS&C Salentica, Riskalyze and SMArtX as official platform partners delivering a well-rounded suite of tools within a unified experience.
However, because we understand the importance of flexibility, we also wanted to give our clients choices, particularly if they already had preferences or experience with certain providers. That meant canvassing our clients exhaustively to understand what they needed, wanted and liked. Which is why we feature a broad integration network outside of our platform partners.
Today, Black Diamond is the hub for more than 45 integration partners spanning the disciplines of financial planning, CRM, portfolio analytics, trading and rebalancing, risk analytics, compliance, asset management platforms, document management and exchange, and other more specialized areas. On top of that, we have automated interfaces with more than 900 custodians.
And this is by no means a static program. We are constantly looking to add high-quality integrations whose solutions are a good fit for our clients. We are also attuned to the rapid evolution of the fintech space, with exciting new start-up companies, product concepts and business models that didn’t even exist a few years ago. If something new and different looks like it would add value for our clients, and yours, we are on it.
Integrations dramatically extend and enhance the value of Black Diamond as the nerve center of an advisory business, giving advisors the capabilities to deliver a complete wealth picture and a comprehensive, customized service for each client that is truly more than the sum of its parts.