Campanale's GPS meant to help indies compete with elite full-service reps. First Allied Securities, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Advanced Equities Financial Corporation (AEFC) is out with a new fee-based investment platform. Guided Portfolio Solutions (GPS) is meant to give the broker-dealer's 1,000 or so affiliated advisors access to products and support services that will help them create bespoke investment programs.

For now all that's available on GPS is something called Fund Allocator: a managed mutual-fund program that features outside-manager market models from First Allied's in-house money manager Advanced Equities Asset Management (AEAM). But AEFC plans to add a separately managed account (SMA) program that can use AEAM's asset-allocation models or not, and a unified managed account (UMA) that combines AEAM's asset allocation and outside-manager blends with overlay-management services to give First Allied advisors "truly expansive and differentiated asset management capabilities," according a promotional blurb from the San Diego-based broker-dealer.

In sum, GPS is supposed to evolve into something that helps First Allied brokers tailor investment plans to the risk appetites and planning objectives of their individual clients -- and do it in a way that's consistent across all products on the platform.

UMAs are single-account investment products that feature multi-manager combinations of SMAs, mutual funds, alternatives and ETFs. Overlay management is the process of aligning trading activity and managing cash flow while taking into account investor preferences and overall tax efficiency of UMAs and other manager-model portfolios.

Great expectations

"This open-architecture system is the first step in a series of advisor-driven services that will set First Allied apart in the financial services industry," says Frank Campanale, CEO of Advanced Equities Wealth Management, which provides wealth-management and investment-consulting products and services to First Allied and to AEFC's "captive"-broker Private Client Group. "Today we are helping advisors simplify and increase the efficiency of their advisory business; next, we will expand the platform's capabilities to eventually culminate in a complete wealth-management solution suite."

As a veteran of E.F. Hutton and a co-founder -- and until late 2003, CEO -- of Smith Barney's fee-based Consulting Group, Campanale was an early mover in the business of providing institutional-strength investment consulting services to private clients in a retail-brokerage setting. Indeed, some Consulting Group brokers -- many now employed by Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a two-month-old combination of Citigroup's Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley's brokerage -- work exclusively with institutions and family offices.

Campanale, who has been with AEFC since early in 2008, sees GPS similarly equipping AEFC advisors to bring in institutional as well as private clients -- a necessary ingredient, he says, to making AEFC a destination of choice "for entrepreneurial advisors [who are] committed to growing their businesses."

First Allied's president and CEO Adam Antoniades seems to agree. "GPS provides First Allied advisors with a strong position when competing with advisors from the largest wirehouses and other independents by providing the quality and consistency that their discerning clients have come to demand," he says.

GPS' proposal generation, rebalancing and reporting comes from New York-based middle-office provider FolioDynamix, which acquired acquired SunGard's SMA-platform provider Advisor Technologies last summer. -FWR

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