Americas Best TAMPS 2024 - 20

2024 AMERICA'S BEST TAMPS
We track a lot of product-class solutions
in America's Best TAMPs. Many might
look alike to a casual observer. It's only
when you dig into the details that their
real differentiated propositions emerge,
making one a perfect fit for a given
advisor, while the others work better
with another firm.
The key is the ease with which any
product-based TAMP interacts with the
underlying platforms. If you're in the
superstore, you've got access to tens of
thousands of advisors looking for a way
to serve their clients just a bit better.
On its own, a TAMP product provider is
really just a small platform-a boutique,
if you will-or an isolated piece of
software on an advisor's screen.
As much as advisory technology
solution providers in the past wanted to
get onto wholesale or custody platforms
to get access to advisors, the goal of
product providers today is getting onto
TAMP platforms.
Of course you need to be unique to
be noticed, and fill a pressing need to
attract advisors to incorporate your
products into their practices. The world
is full of redundant large-cap strategies
and look-alike bond ladders.
One of the reasons the TAMP approach
originally evolved was to liberate advisors
from all the empty duplication of effort it
took to maintain all those strategies inhouse.
As assets converge on leading
products, the copycats will fade away. It's
time to offer something nobody else does.
You may not have your own sprawling
technology platform. You may even have
delegated all the asset management
and the entire back office, so there's no
conventional " product " that makes your
firm unique. But as long as you've done
internal work integrating the platform
and products into your practice, you've
probably developed something like a
proprietary business process to deploy
the technology more efficiently and get
better client outcomes.
Maybe you've got a better financial
planning system that asks different
questions, or checks in with clients at
different points in their lives. You might
have come up with a better way to work
with their children and other relatives,
or monitor held-away assets without
getting in colleagues' way.
New risk tolerance tools that track
investor stress in various news cycles,
new questionnaires to prove suitability
and streamline compliance, new
onboarding checklists-it's all a process
you can automate and sell.
REACH FOR TOMORROW
The glory of this approach is that you
don't need to hand over any task or
function that you like doing. If you
really enjoy running client statements
personally, you have the time to do it.
However, the odds are good that when
a robot can do it better and cheaper
than you, it's not the part of your job
description that makes you happy. More
likely it's a process that's quickly becoming
commodified, with compensation
deteriorating as the robots drive fees
closer and closer to zero. If that's what you
love, you'll need to do it for free.
Everything else is negotiable. Once
you've delegated, you should have the
time and mental bandwidth to figure out
what you do best and how you're going
to fill those suddenly free hours. Do you
have a unique set of portfolios that are
ideal for a particular type of client or
exploit? Esoteric asset class or theme?
Become a model provider.
Even if an asset class or strategy is so
rarefied that only a few of your clients
can really benefit from its intricacies,
odds are good that other advisors
will have one or two accounts with
comparable needs. It's not costTM
effective
for them to build out that kind
of expertise internally: Rent them your
brain for a few minutes a year, and take
some fee income in return.
Or perhaps it's on the service side
that you go above and beyond your
competitors. Maybe you're mainly
paid for your planning orientation. You
offer the full package of investment
management services, but your
expertise really revolves around top-ofthe-line
tax, education funding or estate
planning advice.
Why aren't you packaging and selling that
to advisors who are too far into the weeds
managing portfolios? You could try to peel
their clients away, but that's a hard and
uncertain route-especially when you can
simply step in as a virtual planner, work
your magic and collect your check.
You can also push your expertise to
the robots themselves, where they can
make it available to clients who need or
want to add value. Financial Engines,
the grandfather of all robo-advisor apps,
is built on the insight of Nobel laureate
William Sharpe. Private equity paid
$3 billion for that company. That could
be you.
Robot platforms have been most
successful with mass-affluent investors
who rarely have appreciable assets
or financial goals beyond allocating
the retirement accounts, but as those
accounts mature, they're going to need
help.
If you've got a proprietary knack or
process for delivering that flesh-andblood
relationship, develop it into a
system of rules a robot can follow.
That's a system you can release to the
robots or to all the advisors who simply
aren't as good with the human touch
as you are. You can do something that
wasn't in that checklist of things TAMPs
can do today. And just like that, you're a
TAMP, too.
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Americas Best TAMPS 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Americas Best TAMPS 2024
