OMAHA, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Orion Advisor Services, LLC ("Orion"), the premier portfolio management solution provider for registered investment advisors, will serve the portfolio management needs of Donaldson Capital Management (“DCM”), a national, fee-only RIA managing more than $1.5 billion in assets and one of Financial Times’ Top 300 Financial Advisers. Orion and DCM announced their partnership today at TD Ameritrade Institutional’s National LINC 2019 conference.

After a lengthy search, the RIA chose Orion for its robust tech offering, commitment to service, and a culture of innovation that also aligns with TD Ameritrade Institutional’s open architecture Veo One technology platform, vital considerations for a firm of DCM’s size and complexity, said Blake Alsman, portfolio manager at Donaldson Capital, an Evansville, Ind.-based firm that custodies with TD Ameritrade Institutional.

“We’ve come a long way from the early days of using Excel, Word and stacks of screen prints to make block trades,” Alsman said. “We’ve grown to a 37-employee RIA serving more than 1,300 families, institutions and foundations, and we needed a tech solution that could keep up with us.”

The scale and complexity of DCM’s work demanded more than a one-size-fits-all solution. While competing tech providers demonstrated robust offerings, Orion won out for its superior control on a granular level, a dramatically more pronounced trajectory of innovation, and a strong culture of service and dialogue with customers, Alsman said.

On a technical level, the powerful direct indexing capabilities of Orion’s ASTRO, trading and rebalancing tools in Eclipse and Orion’s newly-enhanced Report Builder tipped the scales in Orion’s favor for DCM. Alsman noted Orion’s rapid pace of innovation as another contributing factor in Donaldson’s choice: Orion’s offering has matured significantly over the past three years, and the breakneck pace of innovation shows no sign of slowing any time soon. And with a voice on Orion’s Advisory Board, DCM was confident they would be an active participant in Orion’s technological roadmap, not guinea pigs for untested software.

“We’ve put our hearts into advancing the intuitiveness and sophistication of our tech offering to create more appealing solutions for firms like Donaldson,” said Orion CEO Eric Clarke. “We couldn’t be happier to work with them and look forward to their feedback to better serve them and continue to build an innovative experience for RIAs of all sizes.”

Orion’s responsiveness, entrepreneurial spirit and culture of service resonated with DCM. Orion stood out from the crowd by making its code available on Github, establishing a true, ongoing dialogue with clients over product updates, and demonstrating the high-level understanding and clarity of vision of its leadership, Alsman said.

“We have a saying at Donaldson: we like to make sure everyone has ‘a servant’s heart,’ not just being smart and good at what we do. That resonated more for us with the Orion crowd than with their competitors,” Alsman said.