Vestmark, NDEX and Forms Logic target RIA models, data and transitions

Vestmark is giving RIAs a white-labeled tool for building and running model portfolios from First Trust Portfolios strategies, one of three vendor partnerships announced this week for independent advisory firms.

The offering runs through the Vestmark Model Marketplace and will launch with exchange-traded funds, mutual funds and interval funds, the semiliquid closed-end vehicles that buy back shares from investors at set intervals rather than daily. Advisors can adjust the models for individual clients while Vestmark's infrastructure handles trading, tax-aware transitions out of legacy holdings and ongoing tax management, InvestmentNews reported. The Wakefield, Massachusetts-based firm says its technology supports more than $2 trillion in assets, 5.5 million investor accounts and more than 72,000 advisors, and that six of the 10 largest managed account program providers use it.

Each deal targets recurring work that grows with the book rather than with headcount: model construction, multi-custodian reconciliation and account transitions. In the Vestmark arrangement the advisor keeps the tailoring while trade generation and the tax-aware liquidation of legacy holdings sit with the vendor. At NDEX, a firm can license a single function — performance reporting, say — rather than the whole platform.

Vestmark's own Form ADV, filed March 30, reports $49.9 billion in regulatory assets, 84,069 accounts and 33 employees. The two sets measure different populations: assets on Vestmark's software platform and what the firm reported in its own regulatory filing.

Montreal-based NDEX Systems is expanding its Schwab Advisor Services work with two products RIAs can buy separately or together. Data Bridge ingests custodial feeds and other financial records across multiple custodians and asset types, then normalizes and reconciles the information so it can feed a firm's existing CRM, reporting, investment accounting and trading software. F-Engine, NDEX's wealth management platform, uses the same reconciled data for portfolio management, performance reporting and advisor workflows, including reporting on alternative and off-book assets. Firms can also license individual F-Engine functions rather than the full platform.

The First Trust agreement adds to a run of asset-manager deals for Vestmark, which recently teamed up with Allspring on advisor-built model portfolios. "RIAs increasingly want access to the investment expertise of leading asset managers without giving up the flexibility to tailor portfolios around individual client needs," said Rob Battista, executive vice president of advisory solutions at Vestmark. For a firm licensing this technology, the split is what stays in-house: with Vestmark the strategies come from the asset manager and the trading runs on Vestmark's systems, while with NDEX the reconciled data lands in software the firm already owns.

The third tie-up pairs Forms Logic with Orion on transition automation. Orion separately plans to charge technology vendors for data access, as Private Wealth Daily previously reported.