Account aggregation, CRM added to TradePMR platform

TradePMR Inc., a small, privately held brokerage firm located in Gainesville, Florida, is holding its annual user’s conference this week.

To drum up some buzz in conjunction with the show, today it announced the integration of its own eCustody Advisor Workstation with Advisors Exchange TotalView, a third-party account aggregation offering.

To add a little perspective TradePMR now has about 550 RIAs on board and has been around since 1999.

It has aspirations, though, of becoming the premiere custodian and platform among RIAs.

Its platform, including the integrations discussed below allows an RIA to perform or provide for account opening, ACAT transfers, contact management, account aggregation, performance reports, online client access, trading and fee billing.

According to Fred Van Den Abbeel, an executive vice president with TradePMR, the majority of its advisers, about 80%, are true fee-only, while the remaining 20% are hybrid advisers that also have commission business.

“We added about 225 firms in 2009 and out of those about 25% of them were guys leaving the wirehouses,” Mr. Van Den Abbeel said. He added that because TradePMR is a privately held firm, it would not share the assets they currently have under management.

The TotalView integration is meant to provide advisers with real time access to their clients’ portfolio, including assets held at competing brokerage firms, banks, and insurance companies, among other providers.

TotalView account aggregation is available on a subscription basis (about $150 a month, but pricing wasn’t finalized when I last spoke to them) to all TradePMR advisers and access is free of charge to their clients. It’s the clients, by the way, who grant RIAs the authorization to view their accounts.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of the firm’s rollout last week of an integrated CRM system to their platform.

As one might expect, the CRM system is integrated with TradePMR’s electronic account opening system so that once a client is added their data immediately populates the CRM system.

Mr. Van Den Abbeel and chief technology officer Dennis Suppe gave me an impressive demonstration of the eCustody platform, including the CRM system, a few weeks back.

“We’re not trying to become a Junxure or a Redtail,” Mr. Suppe said during the online demo, “Our goal is to integrate the contact and the contact grouping — we’re building CRM capabilities into our platform.”

He added that TradePMR would continue to allow advisers on the platform to use other CRM systems, though at present their only other full integration was with Redtail Technology’s offering. That system pulls data from TradePMR and updates an adviser’s accounts on a nightly basis.

“A lot of our guys coming to us though are looking for the basics, including basic practice management and other types of applications,” he said.

Users within an advisory firm can view and share contacts, notes and tasks within the system and it also ties into TradePMRs eCustody performance reporting for creating individual and consolidated reports across individuals, households, or firm-wide.

“This costs a flat $99 a month whether you’ve got one or 1,000 accounts,” Mr. Van Den Abbeel said.

During our conversation, I asked what the underlying technology was powering the eCustody platform: Version 3.5 of the Microsoft .Net Framework and the ASP.NET web application framework, though they will ultimately be transitioning over to the Microsoft Silverlight framework.

I was impressed to hear that TradePMR has a total of seven developers and several quality assurance folks on staff.

I’d love to hear from advisers that are currently using the platform.

For more information visit TradePMR online.