Ah the romance of it all, writing novels of Shakespearian scale with quill and ink. Yeah right! Wait a minute while I go out and crank up my model T! Sadly this is the harsh reality many financial services firms face today. For example; let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart – portfolio rebalancing. Why would anyone spend days, weeks or longer rebalancing their accounts with a spreadsheet or worse - by hand? Why? Because someone gets that feel good feeling being an Excel wizard?

The losses associated with these kind of business practices cannot even be measured in dollars and cents. Oh, to be sure, you can calculate the hours it took you and your staff. And maybe you can even calculate the losses your portfolios incurred because you could not adjust in a timely fashion in this volatile market. However, you can never calculate lost opportunity. Time spent managing operations, is time lost with clients and creating new business opportunities.

Thus automation technologies such as rebalancing have become a critical component of wealth management today.  Rebalancing, however, is not the only time-intensive operation causing much pain and suffering. Workflow in most organizations is repeatable and can be automated. Yet many insist on doing things manually. Even with stand-alone automation products, we still seem to be unable to make them all speak the same language.

For example; if I am managing accounts in my portfolio management system, why should I have to open my CRM manually to make an entry? Why is it so hard to close the loop on trade order creation, submission, execution and reconciliation? Why can't I bring in  new customers, assess their risk appetite, select the appropriate allocation model and then rebalance the account? Why is the following work flow so time consuming and error prone:  check  tax consequences, create the orders, submit orders to compliance, compliance approves and submits orders to the trade desk, trade desk submits to custodian, custodian makes the trade, custodian returns results, and finally operations reconciles the trades. Why can't I do that in one simply managed workflow system? The answer is you can.

Stay tuned for more in part II