RIA with 8 billion AUM reduces custodial account opening time by 34% with Feathery

Overview

The RIA has 8 billion AUM and is committed to creating individually tailored portfolio solutions that meet investors’ individual financial objectives. They provide an integrated suite of services from portfolio management to tax planning. Our partnership began in 2023.

Challenge

The RIA previously onboarded clients by asking for information live and emailing PDFs back-and-forth. This resulted in missing & incorrect info, inefficient use of advisor time, and a high rate of account opening NIGOs.

Before the RIA’s partnership with Feathery, they would typically email the custodian-provided PDFs to the client directly to fill out. There were typically several documents to complete if they were onboarding a household or several accounts at once, which meant the clients had several dense PDFs with frequently duplicated questions to tackle.

The client would fill out whatever was easiest to complete, leaving the advisor with the time-consuming task of chasing down additional information and correcting any errors they caught.

Solution

Feathery offers a seamless client experience that unifies all of the RIA’s workflows.

Automated Custodial Account Openings & Transitions

The client-facing experience built on Feathery allows for conditionally showing questions and validating inputs to collect the exact information from the client needed to open their accounts.

Once the information is collected, the Schwab accounts are opened either through Feathery’s direct API integration or by auto-filling and signing the relevant Schwab documents.

Synchronize Client Data to the Entire Stack

Feathery’s platform allowed the RIA to easily integrate essential tools into their onboarding & servicing workflows:

• Salesforce: Their CRM for tracking client records.
• Orion: For portfolio management.
• eMoney: For financial planning.‍
• Morningstar: For researching investment products

Unified Data Intake

Aside from opening custodial accounts, the RIA also uses Feathery for risk assessments, questionnaires, and more. They are able to unify many of these forms with the account opening workflow itself, and they only need to ask for new information that they haven’t yet collected.