For financial advisors, income is often closely tied to assets under management (AUM)—the more assets, the higher the revenue potential. Client-facing activities are key for both attracting new clients and retaining existing assets, directly influencing AUM growth. Additionally, an advisor’s business valuation often hinges on AUM and the reliability of recurring fee-based revenue streams. Advisors who establish steady, recurring revenue can significantly increase the value of their business, especially when it’s time to sell.
The Advisor’s Dilemma
With so much at stake, you might expect advisors to streamline or outsource any non-client-facing tasks that detract from maximizing client interaction. However, recent studies reveal a concerning trend: advisors spend more than half their workday on activities that don’t directly involve clients, often due to administrative or operational burdens.
The Genesis of Cy: A Technology-Driven Solution for Advisors
About 25 years ago, I authored Building a World Class Financial Services Business, a guide aimed at helping advisors create an institutional-grade advisory practice. The focus was on process efficiency supported by technology. While the book inspired many, only a few took on the rigorous work required to implement a fully optimized business plan. Recognizing this gap, advisors reached out, asking for a technology solution to simplify and elevate their business quality—that’s when Cy was born.
Cy is a sophisticated fusion of robo-advisory technology with the high-touch, personalized advice advisors provide. This web-based platform is what advisors have long been seeking: a seamless client experience that starts with financial profiling and planning, including assessments of risk, potential loss, and required returns based on retirement goals. Cy integrates these essentials with clients’ cash flow needs, inflation forecasts, and longevity considerations to develop optimized, custom-tailored portfolios.
Transformative Technology Enhancing Client and Advisor Relationship
Cy’s optimization technology goes beyond standard portfolio construction by curating a customized portfolio that aligns with each client’s loss tolerance and targeted rate of return. The platform’s portfolio dashboard provides advisors access to one of the most advanced model portfolio systems in the industry, offering powerful flexibility to further refine portfolio choices to suit each client’s risk profile and return objectives.
Once the advisor finalizes a portfolio selection, Cy’s digital onboarding engine takes over, enabling the simultaneous processing of up to 10 accounts efficiently and accurately, without the typical “Not In Good Order” (NIGO) issues that slow down onboarding. Cy prepares a comprehensive, pre-collated DocuSign package, ready for client signatures. This streamlined approach compresses the account setup timeline from days or even weeks down to mere minutes.
After accounts are opened, WBI’s robust back-office technology steps in, automating account funding, portfolio allocation, trading, reporting, and billing. This means advisors and their teams are free from having to manually manage workflows through legacy BD systems like Envestnet, Orion, and Vestmark. With Cy, advisors gain an outsourced solution that essentially serves as both a Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer, handling their operational needs so they can focus on what truly matters: their clients.
The Advanced Optimization Engine Behind Cy
Cy is powered by an optimization engine that selects top-ranked, risk-adjusted return managers from a broad, agnostic universe of over 40,000 ETFs, mutual funds, and SMAs. The platform prioritizes managers who consistently deliver high returns with lower risk and minimal losses, particularly in bear markets—a compounding advantage for long-term growth. Cy’s optimization engine runs millions of iterations to identify the best possible fit of managers for each portfolio’s target loss profile, ensuring clients achieve the highest rate of return within their risk tolerance.
The science behind Cy’s approach includes Harry Markowitz’s groundbreaking work on diversification and the efficient frontier, leveraging non-correlation and covariance between manager return streams. By aligning with these principles, Cy builds portfolios that can withstand adverse market conditions, empowering clients to stay invested rather than panic-selling during downturns. This stability enables clients to remain committed to their long-term plans, avoiding the “bail and fail” cycle that so often undermines wealth-building efforts.
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