The Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) landscape is experiencing significant growth, with a 4.4% increase in asset management clients and a 12.6% increase in total assets under management (AUM) in 2023 alone. To take full advantage of this momentum, RIAs must accommodate the needs of increasingly sophisticated investors and scale their operations while managing costs.
Yet legacy processes are holding RIAs back. Many advisors still rely on outdated trading systems or manual workflows that invite inefficiency and risk. As the landscape becomes more complex, firms are demanding capabilities tailored to the unique challenges of their business: managing an array of models, juggling custodial relationships, automating repetitive processes and more. Efficiency and accuracy are critical success factors, making it essential for RIAs to adopt a modern trading platform that enables seamless portfolio management and execution.
For firms looking to transition from legacy tools and manual workflows to a sophisticated RIA trading platform, LiquidityBook’s Portfolio, Order and Execution Management System (POEMS) provides a fully cloud-based, modular and scalable solution designed to help RIAs compete at an institutional level. We can’t solve every challenge RIAs are facing — but we can give advisors a path to a more robust, more competitive offering from front to back.
RIA Trading Platforms Today: Legacy Challenges Abound
Many RIAs operate with aging platforms that were built for a different era, providing only basic functionality. These tools are often slow to upgrade, leaving advisors ill-equipped to handle the realities of today’s investment landscape. And even that isn’t necessarily a given — many firms don’t have a platform at all, instead depending on spreadsheets and similarly manual processes that lead to a wide range of vulnerabilities.
As RIAs grow and manage more high-net-worth and institutional clients, their mandates grow accordingly. They must implement custom asset allocations, juggle complex compliance mandates and support model-based trading across thousands of accounts. With models growing ever more sophisticated and specialized, the innovation burden has never been higher. All this involves considerable time and cost. The natural result is increasing headcount or slowing down — unless you can identify a fundamentally different solution.
What’s more, with each client introducing its own custodian to the process, RIAs must navigate an incredibly complex web of execution rules, file formats, workflows and so on. Even if an advisor only needs to work with a handful of the most prominent custodians — think Fidelity, Pershing and Schwab — this fragmentation can slow down processes considerably. In addition, investor-specific mandates regarding tax efficiencies, cash balance requirements and other non-standard preferences further complicate trade execution, creating a critical need for flexible automation.
Managing all this via legacy systems and processes can result in hours of lost productivity, increased risk of errors and less bandwidth to refine models and seize opportunities. Every day spent relying on these outmoded methods equates to time and dollars lost. The solution: a modern, modular RIA trading platform that can streamline workflows, reduce operational overhead and fuel a better return on investment across both technology and people.
The Future of RIA Technology: Performance and Scale with LiquidityBook
LiquidityBook’s POEMS is an ideal solution for RIAs looking to eliminate inefficiencies and implement a scalable, high-performance trading solution. Unlike traditional systems that require significant upfront investment and rigid infrastructure, POEMS is modular and flexible, with a cloud-based infrastructure that enables rapid enhancements to meet clients’ precise needs. RIAs can select only the features they require, gradually scale their use of the platform and work with our team to enhance our features in near real time, creating widespread benefits.
Our solutions address many of advisors’ most pressing trading and portfolio management challenges. In addition to delivering core trading functionality — flexible order entry, wide-ranging FIX connectivity, robust asset class support and powerful UI features that streamline workflows — we’ve built tools purpose-built to address the realities that RIAs face. Here are just a few examples:
Seamless Portfolio Management and Rebalancing
Managing and rebalancing models across thousands of accounts can be cumbersome — unless you can automate the process. With LiquidityBook’s POEMS, RIAs can automatically rebalance portfolios in response to market movements or investment model changes. Highly flexible, the system can be tailored to accommodate a wide range of client-specific mandates, so firms can maintain a highly diverse customer base. These automated capabilities eliminate manual intervention and reduce the risk of errors and operational bottlenecks.
Automated Custodian and Compliance Handling
Similar to client-specific investment mandates, juggling a vast array of custodial relationships and their specific constraints is one of the most significant pain points for RIAs. With robust filesharing and integration protocols with the industry’s leading custodians, LiquidityBook’s POEMS enables clients to automatically route trades to the correct counterparty, supported by built-in compliance monitoring that ensures adherence to client preferences. These capabilities have a powerful streamlining effect on the historically painful process of connecting to each individual custodian and approaching them with the right information in the right manner.
Scaling and Selling Model Portfolios
While delivering for clients is the core of the RIA business, the ability to sell model portfolios to other advisors and investment managers represents an important new revenue stream. Historically, this process has been complex and inefficient, but with LiquidityBook’s POEMS, RIAs can easily export their model and automatically distribute it to other advisors on the platform, creating an ecosystem of efficiencies. This elimination of manual file transfers enables firms to monetize not just their services, but their strategies and expertise, all in a scalable manner that helps them thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Conclusion: Time to Modernize
The RIA space is evolving rapidly, and firms that cling to outdated technology risk falling behind. By adopting a modern, modular trading platform like LiquidityBook’s POEMS, RIAs can streamline operations, enhance compliance and unlock new revenue opportunities — without adding unnecessary complexity. Now is the time to move beyond legacy limitations and embrace a scalable, future-ready solution. If you’d like to learn more, drop us a line.
