Press Room
Smartleaf Reaches Milestone of 40 Bank Clients and $6Billion AUM
Cambridge, MA. June 20, 2006—Smartleaf, Inc. has announced that it has gone from two clients and $50 million in assets under management at the beginning of 2005 to forty clients and over $6 billion in assets under management today.
Smartleaf’s explosive growth in the last eighteen months is largely due to the desire of sponsors (particularly banks) to open their separately managed account investment platform to the best available money managers while not relinquishing fiduciary control to third party investment firms. Smartleaf makes it possible for sponsors to achieve these goals by supporting models-based Unified Managed Accounts that are managed in-house. With Smartleaf, the sponsor takes on the role of overlay manager, providing true customization and optimization across internally or externally generated investment models. In becoming the overlay manager, the sponsor is able to add value via sophisticated tax, risk and expense management and thereby occupy the center of the investment value chain.
According to Steve Winks, founder of Senior Consultant, “Investment advisory firms must go beyond their conventional operating models to secure their competitive market position. Each day, Smartleaf sends actionable, pre-trade compliant and tax-efficient recommendations with the rationale of each trade to the advisor. These recorded recommendations automatically keep each of thousands of unique client portfolios in compliance with the agreed upon investment policy statement. Because of this automation from Smartleaf, banks gain access to best-in-class outside managers while maintaining the historically attractive profit margins associated with proprietary management.”
Gerard Michael, president of Smartleaf, states, “Our product development has been, and will continue to be, driven by our customers’ needs and advice. As a result, Smartleaf has become the trusted choice for banks that require a scalable approach to managing individual accounts.”
Smartleaf, founded in 1999, provides ASP-based technology for financial institutions managing individual investor accounts. Smartleaf’s offering, Smartleaf Portfolio Manager, allows firms to manage, in a highly customized fashion, thousands of individual accounts with unprecedented tax and operational efficiency. Utilizing in-house or third party model portfolios, Smartleaf Portfolio Manager generates, on a daily basis, actionable tax-lot trade recommendations for each individual portfolio. These recommendations are automatically pre-trade compliant and tax, risk and expense sensitive.