WealthTouch Offers Tax Advice To Clients

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, New York

05 February 2002

US wealth management consulting firm, WealthTouch, announced yesterday that it has formed a tax consulting group to provide personalized tax services to its high-net-worth client base. The group was formed by the addition of five members from the tax practice group of Higgins, Meritt and Burdick, a Denver-based accounting firm that separated last year.

Denver-based WealthTouch is composed of accounting, tax and technology professionals who provide back office support and consulting for the institutions that serve the high net worth market. The service, which operates on a proprietary Internet-based software platform, includes financial data aggregation, expense management, and preparation of financial reports for family members, financial advisors and estate planning professionals. WealthTouch services wealth managers of high-net-worth individuals with an average of $25 million and up in assets.

A few days ago, WealthTouch chose ByAllAccounts’ WebPortfolio for the delivery of financial data and portfolio analysis for its clients. “WebPortfolio enables us to provide complete daily transaction data from both the retail and institutional sides of financial markets to wealth managers, which we haven't been able to do before," said Rick Higgins, CEO of WealthTouch. “Our professionals are able to quickly gather this critical information and create detailed metrics to make the data more meaningful to our clients. WebPortfolio is the only aggregation product that we have found that brings the added value of comprehensive transactional data that allows us to use in-depth analytical tools that add the meaning behind the numbers.”

“Today’s financial advisors have come to realize that first-generation aggregation is no longer enough,” said L. Patrick Gardner, President and CEO of ByAllAccounts. “We provide an advanced solution that lets the advisor view the entire portfolio of a client—both managed and non-managed accounts—and supplement this holistic view with market data and analysis tools that support sound financial strategies to grow assets for their clients, themselves and their firm.”

At the core of ByAllAccounts’ wealth management solution is a proprietary data collection and categorization technology that allows account information from more than 1,200 financial institutions—including banks, brokerages, mutual fund companies, retirement plans and trusts— to be automatically aggregated and analyzed for the creation of consolidated investment portfolios. ByAllAccounts’ WebPortfolio product is an advisor-client collaboration tool that allows investment advisors and their preferred clients to analyze and view the aggregated data for all of their investment portfolios within a single, Web-based application, on demand.

WealthTouch typically serves firms that manage the financial affairs of high net worth individuals with complex portfolios and accounts housed in a variety of financial institutions. The company needed a solution that could provide real-time access to data at hundreds of financial institutions, avoiding the need to manually enter transaction information for each account.

In January, WealthTouch announced that it will begin using an institutional financial data aggregation system developed by New York-based Electra Information Systems to deliver current bank transaction information to the company’s high-net-worth wealth management firms.

“The clients of the wealth managers we serve typically maintain seven to 10 custodian bank relationships to manage their financial portfolios and we needed a means to gather and aggregate that data as part of the service we provide,” said Rick Higgins. “Electra’s ability to provide custodian bank data, and its open architecture, is unparalleled in the industry and we’re excited to be able to offer this service to our clients.”

The system, called DataPIPE, eliminates the hassle of collecting statements of holdings and transactions from custodian banks. The service, which is made available to investment and wealth managers, such as WealthTouch, on a subscription basis, replaces the delivery of hard copy and faxed statements from custodians. Investment and wealth managers receive daily consolidated electronic transmissions of data collected by Electra Information Systems.

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