At Purpose Advisor Solutions, partnerships have always been at the forefront of our discussions around business development. Whether it is to explore a new custodial relationship, seek complementary products, or collaborate with like-minded leaders in our industry, partnerships have been key to continue providing value back to advisors and clients on our platform.
But the greatest benefit? Acceleration. Great partnerships can rapidly advance product innovation in a relatively short amount of time since our partner can bring their expertise to the table, and fast. This means you are provided with features that help you manage your business faster!
That said, we are careful when selecting a partner — it’s a balancing act. Integrations can create an extensive amount of development work that may pull an entire engineering team off our internal product roadmap. They may also leave us with technical debt that could be long-lasting. Each partner relationship must be mutually beneficial, so priorities on both sides can be managed in unison. Ultimately, all tradeoffs need to be seriously considered when evaluating the total benefit that our end users derive from any partnership.
There are typically two forms of partnerships that PAS considers:
A partner integration centres around technology. Specifically, offering another company’s product to users that integrates with our own. A custodial relationship and a financial planning partner would fall into this category. As mentioned earlier, these take considerable engineering effort to build in, and a deep relationship is formed with the partnering team.
Exploring integration partnerships further… what does a perfect integration for PAS look like? This includes two components: the ability for data to flow seamlessly between all parties and to prioritize our partners’ best features to provide the most value. Let’s take a financial planning partner as an example. The goal is for our users — you and your clients — to enter data the fewest number of times and to provide the most value-add once that data has been entered. In our blue sky vision, an advisor would set up a client in their Advisor Portal. The investor would then connect their bank account and other investment account information for a holistic view. They would then confirm and sign their KYC, account opening, and risk survey questionnaires. The inputs and portfolio manager’s portfolio assignment would then flow back to the financial planning software. From there, the financial planning software would create a financial plan for that client (or their household), which would surface in the investor portal for the client to view and track. Again, a blue sky vision — but this is what we would like to aim for when we integrate.
An affiliate partnership is focused on complementary products that are not necessarily integrated into our product. Our partnership with Willful is a great example of this, and we are excited to launch it in the coming weeks. We heard from advisors that they were looking for a digital estate planning solution to offer their clients. Enter Willful — we’re happy to be partnering with the leading solution for this in Canada. Use of the service is at your discretion, but it’s a complementary service that could be useful to your business.
Here at PAS, we’ve learned quite a bit along the way in choosing partners, including important strategic elements that have helped us refine our roadmap as we build toward our vision. We’re excited about our current partners and always on the lookout for more — so long as we’re continuing to add more value to you and your business.
Stay tuned for our upcoming blog series on our current partnerships!
If you are a third-party product manager interested in partnering with us, shoot us an email at product@purposeadvisorsolutions.com! We’re happy to chat.
