Navigating New Traditions in Wealth Management

With Thanksgiving having come and gone last week, the countdown to the end of the year seems to be ticking as fast as ever.

While year-end work-related things may be picking up, I hope you find the time to slow down and spend some quality time with family and friends. I'm sharing a parallel that’s been on my mind thinking about holiday traditions in the feature piece this month.

Here’s an overview of everything I’ll be covering for this month’s edition of Alternative Universe:

1. Navigating New Traditions in Wealth Management

2. Swimming with Allocators Pod

3. Operational Scale for Alts & How Financial Advisors and Fund Managers Can Work Together for Client Success

4. Where You Can Find Us - Factright’s DD Conference

Navigating New Traditions in Wealth Management

As the holiday season has firmly rolled in, I have thought a lot about traditions. I’m sure your family has some that bring you all joy and maybe some that not everyone loves, but the more senior or junior members of the family insist on keeping up. The holidays have a way of demanding the same things from us each year.

But time doesn’t allow for the same old traditions to stand alone. We fold in new family members through birth and marriage or enduring friendship and we learn new things from these new people. We have the capacity to grow and expand beyond what’s known, into greater depths of joy, love and gratitude when we look beyond ‘how we’ve always done it’ and embrace new ideas.

Advisors across the country have the same opportunity at work - to embrace new concepts, new ideas, new opportunities and expand beyond what is traditional. Adding in new service or product offers can be met with as much resistance as your uncle’s desire to not join in the new holiday game time. Although he will likely have a fantastic time playing Cards Against Humanity, the resistance to get him on board can feel daunting.

Playing a role in allocating clients' wealth to private investments poses similar challenges when some of your advisors want to add additional value to your firm. In most cases, Advisory firms see an opportunity to manage more wealth for a client, as a growing opportunity. When it comes to alternatives, Wealth Management firms might be tempted to see it as more work for their team, and not appreciate the effort needed to serve clients who are looking for more sophisticated product offerings.

One challenge to dig into is consistency. Unlike publicly traded companies, private investments often lack standardized reporting requirements, making it challenging to use the little data we get with confidence. Advisors of clients with private allocations encounter difficulties accessing timely and accurate information about their investments, which makes it a real challenge to address the entire picture during a wealth management review.

This opacity can hinder the assessment of investment performance AND introduce doubt, uncertainty, and disappointment in your financial reporting. I spoke with an investor just last week, and they described getting their performance report and seeing four lines with “placeholders” for their private allocations. To be clear, they weren’t placeholders, but because there was a lack of information that fit into the automated process their advisor used to generate the reports, the investor began to doubt the report’s veracity.

Is this something we can blame on the nature of private markets? I don’t think so; not when the client is receiving a statement from the fund with accurate details outlining the accounting for the quarter.

If your firm is going to manage and report on alternatives, structuring the data into a usable format for accounting and performance reporting is a must. Since you can’t access one data feed for all alternatives, this can often mean you need to either give new duties to someone on your team or hire for this new role, neither of which is easy to do.

Private investments tend to involve diverse financial instruments and complex ownership structures. Combine this with a lack of standardized accounting processes and reporting structures and you are faced with a problem that isn’t easy to manage or automate. Reconciling data from various sources, such as financial statements and partnership agreements requires meticulous attention to detail and an understanding of what matters in documents that can be cumbersomely long.

When you start thinking about the effort it will take to get your team on board with these new ideas, workflows and products, it’s easy to sympathize with your uncle who doesn’t want to learn any new holiday games. Thankfully, you don’t have to handle this alone. Addressing these challenges to build trust with your clients, is easier when you have a partner who has a combination of financial expertise, industry knowledge, and a team of experts to run your Portfolio Accounting Software. These skilled professionals are essential to interpreting nuances, addressing discrepancies, and ensuring the reliability of the information that is included in your performance reports and client portals.

When you’re ready to start some new traditions, I’d love to talk about it.

Swimming with Allocators Pod

Earnest Sweat and Alexa Binns just launched a new podcast - Swimming With Allocators. The first episode features an interview with Alifia Doriwala, Co-Chief Investment Officer at RockCreek Capital.

It was a great first episode, and I’m looking forward to seeing what conversations are to come.

Check it out here:

Beyond the Headlines

For Financial Advisors

For Financial Advisors & Fund Managers

Connect With Us ✈️ 

Here’s where you can find at least one member of the Mammoth Team. If your plans align and you're also planning to attend any of these events, please respond to this email so we can coordinate a time to see you!

🗓 Factright’s DD Conference, February 26-28, 2024, Scottsdale, AZ

Mammoth Wins

At the beginning of our year-end quarterly planning meeting a couple weeks ago, we kicked it off by mentioning our personal/professional wins of the last year as well as what we feel is working well for our company as a whole. After everyone on our team went through what they wrote down, Erin, our Chief Legal Officer, pointed out two commonalities among all of our answers:

1. Family was at the core of every team member’s personal win.

2. Collaboration and teamwork was a common thread connecting every team member’s account of what is working for our team.

When I think about the qualities I would want to see in those I surround myself with, an appreciation for family values and a sincere enthusiasm for collaborative teamwork are at the top of that list.

The gratitude I feel for this team continues to grow, not only in the professional space but more importantly for who they are as individuals and the values we share.

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Thanks for reading this month’s edition of The Alternative Universe. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts about anything mentioned in the newsletter, please don't hesitate to reply to this email. I'd love to find a time to talk.

Steve, for the Mammoth Team