BondDesk and Vestmark today announced their plans to build an innovative service that will enable financial advisors to provide their clients with personalized bond portfolios that deliver all the advantages of investing in individual securities with the conveniences of investing in bond funds or other packaged products.
This new service will unite BondDesk's industry-leading retail fixed income platform, BondWorks, with Vestmark's award-winning wealth management solution, VestmarkONE.
With bond yields expected to rise if the Fed pares back its bond buying program, individual fixed income securities will likely become more attractive to long-term investors than bond funds. But given the complexities of bond investing, selecting individual bonds for a client and then managing the portfolio of bonds over time, while key for investors, can be a daunting task for financial advisors. This can make it difficult to attract higher net worth investors who prefer the advantages of individual securities over funds and who demand a greater level of service and expertise.
The BondWorks-VestmarkONE solution will make individual bond portfolio management accessible to a broader range of financial advisors by bringing managed money capabilities to brokerage accounts. More specifically, this new solution will deliver:
Personalized Portfolios with the Conveniences of a Fund
The BondWorks-VestmarkONE solution will enable financial advisors to invest client assets into model portfolios and ladders that have been designed by their research group or liaison trading desk. From there, real-time monitoring, alerting and automated rebalancing will streamline the implementation and management process.
Increased Compliance Resources
This combined solution will also review account restrictions pre- and post-trade at the portfolio-level, account-level and firm-level, providing important compliance and suitability checks. Supervision managers can input concentration-type restrictions, issuer restrictions and credit rating restrictions that will either warn or stop the execution of an inappropriate trade.
"Constructing and managing a portfolio of individual bonds can be a complicated and manual process that falls outside the comthe comfort zone of many financial advisors," said John Lunny, Chief Executive Officer at Vestmark. "With VestmarkONE, sophisticated algorithms do the heavy lifting, enabling advisors to spend more time servicing their clients and growing their book of business."
Craig Pfeiffer, Head of Wealth Management at BondDesk, added, "In addition to helping advisors attract and retain assets, this new solution will help protect advisors and their firms from costly compliance violations, and by automating many portfolio monitoring and rebalancing tasks, free liaisons to focus on portfolio model construction and other value-added services. BondDesk looks forward to working closely with Vestmark to bring this innovative joint solution to market."