The Challenge: Manual processes, system inefficiencies
The Solution: Choosing Cheetah and Smartleaf
Peak Trust, headquartered in Anchorage, Alaska, has long been a leader in providing customized investment management services. To enhance efficiency, mitigate risk, and grow their operations, Peak Trust integrated Smartleaf, a system for delivering personalized, tax-optimized portfolio management at scale, with Cheetah, a leading trust accounting system. This integration, completed in 2020, has transformed their investment operations, enabling tailored investment management at scale.
Daniel Grondahl, Investment Relationships Officer at Peak Trust, shared how this strategic pairing of technologies has driven significant benefits for their firm and its clients in a case study.
"The combination of Smartleaf and Cheetah enables tailored investment management at scale, which is exactly what we need."
The Challenge: Manual processes, system inefficiencies
Peak had been using Cheetah since 2016 as their trust accounting platform, ensuring accurate custodial record-keeping and transaction processing. However, their old portfolio management and tax optimization processes involved the following frustrations:
- Time-consuming manual data transfers between systems.
- Inconsistent tax optimization, limiting the value delivered to clients.
- Risk of errors due to the need for manual reconciliation.
- Clunky handling of UMAs, making it difficult to track changes from third-party managers.
The Solution: Choosing Cheetah and Smartleaf
Peak Trust wanted excellence in trust accounting and trading and rebalancing. They didn’t want the headaches often associated with multi-vendor integrations. Instead, they wanted to focus their energy on serving clients, helping them grow and protect their wealth, and making them feel like they’re being well taken care of. So, they chose the Cheetah and Smartleaf partnership for a seamless work experience.
The Results: Efficiency, Accuracy, Scalability
Prior to the Cheetah/Smartleaf integration, Peak reviewed every trade manually. Now they only look for exceptions. Implementing asset allocation and model changes used to take weeks. Now, Peak can reliably do it in a day. File uploads and downloads with human intervention disappeared. Other benefits include:
- Enhanced UMA management.
- Timely updates to tax optimization models.
- Seamless trade execution.
Daniel Grondahl commented, "Now, account holdings flow automatically, every day, from Cheetah into Smartleaf, which then analyzes portfolios for tax-optimized and risk-sensitive trade opportunities. Peak only needs to review the recommendations and send the trades back to Cheetah for execution, singly or in batch."
Conclusion: High-Touch Service, Enhanced Tax Management
These operational changes translated into increased speed and reliability. Peak saved at least 2.5 hours a week just on the file compilation, upload, and download process alone, while reducing error.
By automating rebalancing and the interface between Cheetah and Smartleaf, Peak can provide its clients with better tax management and a more tailored investment solution. Most importantly, Peak can spend more time with clients.
"To take all of that and combine it, it really empowers our investment team to make very timely and accurate decisions and implement the models exactly as they were intended. This is a great marriage of two systems that complement each other well,” Grondahl said. “If I had to put it into a few words what we get out of this, it would be, ‘tailored investment management at scale.’"
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