Respective leaders in fixed income technology and wealth management solutions align to make building and managing personalized bond portfolios as easy as investing in bond funds
New York, NY - May 13, 2013 - BondDesk and Vestmark today announced their plans to build an innovative service that will enable financial advisors to provide their clients with personalized bond portfolios that deliver all the advantages of investing in individual securities with the conveniences of investing in bond funds or other packaged products. This new service will unite BondDesk's industry-leading retail fixed income platform, BondWorks®, with Vestmark's award-winning wealth management solution, VestmarkONE.
Given the complexities that exist in bond investing, selecting individual bonds for a client and then managing the portfolio of bonds over time can be a daunting task for financial advisors. This has made it difficult for some advisors to attract higher net worth individuals who prefer the advantages of individual securities over funds and who demand a greater level of service and expertise. The BondWorks-VestmarkONE solution will make individual bond portfolio management accessible to a broader range of financial advisors by bringing managed money features to brokerage accounts. More specifically, this new solution will deliver:
Personalized Portfolios with the Convenience of a Fund
The BondDesk-VestmarkONE solution will enable financial advisors to invest client assets into a model portfolio that has been designed by their research group or liaison trading desk. From there, real-time monitoring, alerting and automated rebalancing will streamline the implementation and management process.
Greater Investor Protection
This combined solution will also enforce account restrictions pre- and post-trade at the portfolio-level, account-level and firm-level ensuring important compliance and suitability requirements are met. Administrators can input concentration-type restrictions, issuer restrictions and credit rating restrictions that will either warn or stop the financial advisor from placing a trade.
"Constructing and managing a portfolio of individual bonds can be a complicated and manual process that falls outside the comfort zone of many financial advisors," said John Lunny, Chief Executive Officer at Vestmark. "With VestmarkONE, sophisticated algorithms do the heavy lifting, enabling advisors to spend more time servicing their clients and growing their book of business."
Craig Pfeiffer, Head of Wealth Management at BondDesk, added, "In addition to helping advisors attract and retain assets, the BondDesk-VestmarkONE solution will improve efficiencies at the liaison trading desk by automating many of the tasks associated with portfolio monitoring and rebalancing." "BondDesk looks forward to working closely with Vestmark to bring this innovative solution to market."
About BondDesk:
BondDesk Group LLC is a leading financial technology company providing innovative, enterprise-wide fixed income solutions to a community of over 2,000 investment firms, including many of the top broker-dealers in North America. BondDesk's workstation solutions, including its flagship BondWorks® Wealth Management Platform, enable over 105,000 financial advisors and asset managers to trade bonds with confidence, manage client portfolios and attract new assets. The company's industry-leading advisor workstation, price transparency, portfolio management and compliance solutions empower wealth managers to better service the needs of the investing public. BondWorks is the first financial services solution to win the highly coveted "Best Application Design" award from the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), one of the world's leading design and usability research and consultancy firms.
In addition, the BondDesk Alternative Trading System (ATS), operated by BondDesk Trading LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, provides the BondDesk community with access to an aggregated pool of over 120,000 daily live offerings of odd-lot fixed income securities in a broad range of asset classes. The BondDesk Trading ATS executes 15,000 to 20,000 transactions per day with high fill ratios and price quality. Access to the ATS is subject to review by BondDesk Trading LLC.
BondDesk Trading LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BondDesk Group LLC.
To learn more, visit www.bonddeskgroup.com, and follow @BondDesk on Twitter.
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Headquartered in Wakefield, Mass. and founded in 2001, Vestmark is a leading provider of portfolio management solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors, enabling them to efficiently manage customized client portfolios through an innovative technology platform. Supporting over $1.5 trillion in assets and 5.5 million accounts, Vestmark is a partner to some of the largest and most respected wealth management firms. For more information about Vestmark’s solutions, call (781) 224-3640 or visit www.vestmark.com.
Elizabeth Shim
Haven Tower
(424) 317-4861
eshim@haventower.com
