National Financial Services Corp., Fidelity Investments' clearing arm, today announced some substantial enhancements to its Streetscape web-based brokerage workstation.
Called Streetscape Fee-Based Tools, the package includes a mix of new and updated features for account grouping and account management, block trading, portfolio modeling and re-balancing.
The improvements are meant to help National Financial’s growing number of hybrid advisers (those carrying out both fee- and commission-based business) and be an attraction to others, especially breakaway brokers.
The new features are already being used by 50 firms. The enhancements will be made available to the remainder of National Financial’s 300 correspondent firms by sometime early next year.
Many of the tools draw either directly from or are based on technologies developed for Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services’
Fidelity WealthCentral platform.
For example, much of the technology behind the new re-balancing features added to Streetscape is a result of work completed by Northfield Information Services Inc., which built the re-balancing engine used in WealthCentral.
The new block-trading features are meant to allow users to place a single trade that, when executed, can be allocated to multiple client accounts — with each benefiting from the same average share price.
Re-balancing and modeling features enable the management of client portfolios in assigned models; these can be created by advisers themselves or imported (for example as .CSV files) and allows for the generation of trades required to bring positions back to within defined tolerances.
Client accounts can be grouped in such a way as to assist with viewing and generating transactions across multiple accounts, including by household.
New data importing and exporting features allow for customer account data and orders to feed between third-party or proprietary applications, including those from Advent Software Inc. and Morningstar Inc.
A transaction report, among other reporting improvements, helps advisers track transaction history either on a daily basis or using date ranges.
“What we are doing with these new tools is bringing the best of what Fidelity has to offer,” said Richard N. Hart III, senior vice president of platform solutions for National Financial.
“Between IWS and National Financial you’ve got nearly $1 trillion in assets being managed,” he said. “And thanks to the investment we’ve made in technology, we have the ability to service that amount efficiently.”
Related stories:
Fidelity WealthCentral adds clients, trading capabilities
Custodians rev up their platforms
Clearing firms count on the appeal of crossover technology
Breakaway brokers still a trickle, not a tide
