Enhancements supposed to help advisors oversee managed account portfolios. Wealth-management technology provider InvestEdge says it has tweaked its web-based portfolio-management and performance-reporting platform to make it easier for advisors to see that separately managed accounts (SMAs) and unified managed accounts (UMAs) meet their clients' objectives.

SMAs are customizable portfolios made up of individual securities. UMAs are single-account investment products that typically feature combinations of manager-model separately managed accounts, mutual funds and ETFs.

Mixed models

"Advisors select best-of-breed managers based on their specific investment styles, and the role of the styles in meeting client objectives," says InvestEdge business-development head Jeff Cowley. "But advisors often struggle to measure effectiveness when a portfolio contains assets outside of the manger's prescribed intent."

Cowley gives the example of a large-cap manager including mid-cap assets and cash in a client's account. "While this may be well justified, the true performance and allocation of the portfolio are misrepresented when the classification of constituent assets are used for calculations and reporting," he says.

In addition to enhancing SMA and UMA functionality, InvestEdge also recently updated functionality for internally managed accounts. including the ability to create, maintain and report performance for composite portfolios, workflow tools for streamlining investment reviews and administrative reviews, and customizable asset-classification features to help advisors "categorize assets at a more granular level," according to an InvestEdge press release.

"Many of our clients leverage a mix of internal and external managers," says Cowley. "Almost all that are not presently using overlay managers have it under consideration." Eight-year-old, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based InvestEdge's counts Wilmington Trust, Glenmede Trust, TD Banknorth, and Merrill Lynch's Private Banking and Investment Group among its institutional clients. -FWR

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