InvestEdge: Maximize Investments with Professional Wealth-Management Solutions

By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ INSART

InvestEdge is a long-standing leader in the world of FinTech. InvestEdge provides a platform with a streamlined set of suites and tools to handle all aspects of wealth management, including portfolio management, trading and rebalancing, performance metrics, reporting, and data aggregation. With over 18 years in the industry, InvestEdge is one of the most reliable and trusted FinTech companies on the market. In the spring of 2018, InvestEdge surpassed $1T in client assets under management on the InvestEdge platform.

I traveled to Bala Cynwyd, a town near Philadelphia, to meet with one of the two original founders of InvestEdge, Roland Collins. Roland showed me what hard work and almost two decades in the financial space mean in terms of the scope of keeping up with innovation and growing a successful business.

As a young man, Roland had far-reaching ambitions. He started his career off as a software developer for PNC Advisors, where he met InvestEdge’s current CEO and cofounder, Robert Stewart. At PNC, Roland was involved in developing a solution called Co-Pilot for portfolio management, equity research, and trade-order management. After the project reached maturity, Roland and Robert decided that the broader market was in need the types of technologies that they had implemented for PNC. Bob and RC launched InvestEdge right out of Roland’s bedroom in late 2000. Since then, InvestEdge remains committed to bringing clients value by building the products they need to handle data management and, specifically, ultra-high-net-worth data.

What sets InvestEdge apart from its competitors?

Roland outlined the real value that InvestEdge can provide to its major financial institution clients. First, InvestEdge’s data-processing layer allows clients to connect with multiple custodians and accounting systems to get a single and consistent view of the world. The second big differentiating factor is how InvestEdge deals with investment complexity. While other FinTech companies are scaling up their complexity, InvestEdge is essentially scaling down:

“A lot of systems started out in the brokerage world and then moved up in complexity. We started with the ultra-high-net-worth world and we’re building down in complexity. What that means is the investment vehicles used to service ultra-high net worth investors are just inherently more complex than they are in the brokerage world. So our system was designed to handle a broader base of instruments from day one.”

Roland explained that InvestEdge is making a push for advisor efficiency with middle-office solutions. The first module planned for launch is centralized compliance management. Whether the middle-office work is fully automated, through robo-advisors, or incorporates humans, a middle-office approach would have advisors work as a checkpoint to make sure everything is done correctly. This also allows the firm to increase Advisor productivity by moving operations to lower-cost lines of business. Additionally, InvestEdge is developing and maximizing the use of unified managed accounts through sleeveless accounting.

Integrations enrich the customer experience

Over the years, InvestEdge has strategically integrated with many major players in FinTech. Some examples of integrations with accounting systems include SEI TRUST 3000, SunGard, FIS Global, and Advent for a steady and accurate data stream, as well as brokerage systems such as Fidelity and Pershing. InvestEdge is partnered with Northfield for risk monitoring and tax optimization, and FIX Flyer for trade-order management and routing to the InvestEdge Portfolio Management system.

“We’re plugged into most of the major custodians and most of the major accounting system vendors. Then we supplement it with data from Morningstar, from Thomson Reuters, [and] from IDC, etc. So, we’re well versed with most of the vendors that you would come across in the high-net-worth business.”

How InvestEdge processes data

The way that InvestEdge processes data, as mentioned above, is what sets them apart from the rest of the field. The “secret sauce,” as Roland called it, can be boiled down to two patents that InvestEdge holds. The first patent is for a distributed processing engine, a computing framework that handles high-volume workloads in a horizontally scalable way. The second patent is how the data layer works. The brunt of this is how InvestEdge takes different sources of data from accounting systems and data-aggregation tools and overlays these on top of each other. This solution is how InvestEdge enhances the value of data and how it improves data quality, integrity, and the timing of data.

“InvestEdge was really built with the idea that we want to create one single source of truth for your data and then give you the ability to look at your accounts, and your relationships, and your structures the way that you expect to look at them.”

Team structure

Roland said that InvestEdge has a typical structure seen in product delivery from a software-development standpoint. More than half of the 90+ employees work on the technology and development side of the company, and are split up into groups that deliver specific product lines. One half of the team is comprised of developers, business analysts, and QA engineers. The other half includes data analysts, customer and sales support staff, marketing, HR, service specialists, tech support, and an outsourced performance-scrubbing team.