At our recent user conference, we asked clients to hold us to our mission. Here's where we stand.
At our recent user conference, we opened by asking our clients to hold us to high standards, and to call us out if and when we fall short of our mission.
What is that mission? It's to enable wealth advisors to efficiently and programmatically deliver personalized, tax-optimized portfolio management to every client, at the account and household level.
What does that mean in practice? If we're living up to our promise, then:
- It should take no incremental effort to:
- Optimally tax-manage an account or a household
- Customize portfolios with individualized product choices
- Customize portfolios with security, social, and/or religious value screens
- Use a direct index or active equity strategy instead of an ETF
- It should take no more than a day to:
- Implement a tactical asset allocation across your entire book
- Loss-harvest in every account
- It should take no more than one full-time equivalent to review, rebalance, and trade every account in a day.
- The number of hours per day your investor-facing advisors spend reviewing, rebalancing, and trading portfolios should be zero.
Are we there yet? Strictly speaking, no. But we're close.
Here's how we know. The output of our system is a set of trades, down to the tax-lot level, for every account. These are more than suggestions. They're meant to be fully executable, with no changes. We do give clients advanced tools to identify outlier accounts and, if they choose, adjust our trades. That lets us measure how often our recommended trades are modified in any way. If we're doing our job, it shouldn't happen often. In a real sense, any time a client feels the need to modify our trades, we've failed.
So how often does it happen? With our scale clients (our largest clients jointly accounting for over 95% of trade volume through our system), fewer than 1 in 50,000 accounts (0.002%) have any trades modified before execution. Phrased differently: better than 99.998% automation.
That's pretty good. It's not good enough. Our goal is 100%. We're unlikely to get there, but we can keep adding nines.
With that standard set, we spent the rest of the conference trying to make ourselves and our clients stronger.
Much of the conversation was about growth, which makes sense, because our clients are growing fast. Smartleaf clients grow about 14% a year ex-market (above and beyond market appreciation), compared with industry average growth ex market of 0–3% / year. More than half of our revenue now comes from clients who have grown tenfold while working with us. That kind of growth is where our promise really gets tested. When a firm's book grows 10X, its trading operation shouldn't have to.
We walked through new features and our product roadmap, with a particular focus on tax-optimized householding and efficient cash management. We shared data on how clients are actually using the system, including the automation levels above. We hosted panels on acquisitions, on measuring ROI, and on talking to clients.
Two sessions were designed specifically to take our opening request seriously. In "Product Manager for a Day," clients helped design features we're building next. And in the other, we simply left the room. Our clients talked about us among themselves, then came back with suggestions for how we can improve our product and service.
We closed by talking about two things that set us apart.
- Our analysis is holistic. Tax and risk are properties of portfolios, not sleeves, partitions, or subaccounts. That's why we don't use them, and it's why we work at the household level. It's the totality that matters.
- We're built for a uniform, non-churning daily rebalancing workflow. We don't trade on a calendar. We trade whenever it's beneficial to do so. Sometimes that means trading an account several times in a month (think March 2020). Other times it means not trading an account for months on end.
These differences are core to who we are.
More colloquially, we sometimes describe ourselves this way: everything we do is boring. Everything we do, any good advisor already knows how to do. But no advisor can do it expertly, every day, in every account. We can, and it matters a lot.
So that's where we stand: better than 99.998% of the way there (by one measure), and still counting nines. Our thanks to every client who came, who pushed us, and who talked about us behind our backs, at our invitation. Keep holding us to it.
COMMENTS