TAMP stands for Turnkey Asset Management Platform. TAMPs are designed to simplify investment management for both investors and advisors.

Turnkey Asset Management Programs are tech-enabled platforms that allow RIAs, broker-dealers, asset managers and even CPAs to monitor, manage, and provide back-office support for their clients’ investments and asset allocations. Advisors pay a fee to the TAMP for the investment due diligence, asset allocation decision-making, and execution provided by a TAMP. In turn, advisors save time and energy, allowing them to focus on developing new business and providing better advice across their roster of clients.

As a TAMP, GeoWealth offers turnkey asset management solutions, a modern tech stack for advisors and their clients, and robust outsourced back-office servicing (performance reporting, reconciliation, aggregation, billing, trading).

 

Advisors need time and energy to support clients across their many needs. Accordingly, an Investment News report found that more than 1 in 4 advisors stated that their primary reason for partnering with a TAMP was to free up time to serve clients. The report also indicated that nearly 24% of advisors turned to TAMPs for their investment management expertise and another 20% rely on outsourced investment managers to control expenses in the event of a market downturn.

Who should use a TAMP to find time-savings and cost-savings gains?

1. Independent Investment Advisors
Whether you’re leaving an independent broker-dealer or traditional wirehouse, or just starting out on your own as a new RIA firm, a TAMP can provide the needed infrastructure, technology and support to get the your new RIA up and running on Day One.

2.  Corporate RIAs
Managing an increasingly large and complex organization means that any incremental efficiencies gained will result in a massive benefit. Corporate RIAs can use a TAMP as their tech stack (or at least the bulk of it), as a way to manage the investment products available to their advisors, and as a way to standardize advisor onboarding and processes. A TAMP can help a Corporate RIA Home Office scale in a repeatable and compliant fashion.

 

3. Asset Managers
A TAMP can provide turnkey access to an asset manager’s model portfolios to the RIA market and meet the extremely high standards RIAs demand – cutting edge technology, personal service, and competitive pricing. GeoWealth’s open-architecture TAMP supports a broad array of asset classes, from equities to fixed income to alternatives like structured notes.

Simply put, a TAMP is designed to operate as an extension of an advisor’s office, working quietly and efficiently in the background.

TAMPs work by combining many disparate functions and workflows into a painless and affordable outsourced solution. Advisors no longer have to track down multiple sets of forms or client information to pass along to strategists. Instead, they collect and provide a single packet of information containing the client’s strategist or models and pass it along to the TAMP. As sub-advisor, the TAMP then typically handles all processing and investing. That means no more tedious tasks, like aggregation, reconciliation, reporting, and billing.

In-house client service personnel no longer waste hours on hold, waiting for custodians to rectify any issues that arise. That’s the job of the TAMP. Tax documents, beneficiary paperwork, and client statements? Those are securely handled by the TAMP.

TAMP pricing varies by provider, task complexity, and the expenses of underlying investment vehicles. Often, TAMPs that have their own proprietary technology are able to charge less than TAMPs that rent the components of their platform from other companies since that layers additional fees into the operating structure of the TAMP. At GeoWealth, we provide custom pricing based on each firm’s individual needs and characteristics.

In using a TAMP, advisors can reclaim their time without adding salaries or benefit costs to the firm’s overhead. Operational trading costs are reduced, too, as are accompanying service requests that can affect advisor efficiency. Properly structured TAMP partnerships result in costs fluctuating alongside revenue, helping smooth a firm’s financial ratios during periods of market volatility or employee turnover.

You understand how important it is to act as a partner to your clients – not just managing their money, but listening to their concerns, providing expert guidance, and making strategic recommendations in service of their goals.

Your TAMP should do the same for you. The right TAMP will treat you like more than a one and-done contract, looking for ways to help you better serve your clients, solve operational pain points, and ultimately grow your business.

The financial advisor of today is forced to be many things at once: a financial planner, guidance counselor, client confidante, and master of all-thing-back-office. To do all that and focus on client relationships means that something’s got to give. You can’t afford to spend the majority of your time
managing tedious back-office functionality – or hiring, onboarding and training in-house
employees to do it for you.

Working with a TAMP  enables financial advisors to focus on providing holistic, professional guidance and support to their clients. How? The TAMP takes on those less valuable but still business-critical middle- and back-office tasks.

Since not all TAMPs are the same, it’s important to know what to look for – and what to stay away from – in a TAMP partner. Here’s our 5 red flags to avoid when evaluating the right TAMP for your firm.

1. A fee structure that doesn’t align with yours
When a TAMP outsources some services, or licenses some underlying technologies, fees can
skyrocket to account for the additional providers. Advisors should also look out for hidden
fees baked into some TAMPs’ limited lineups of models and strategists.

2. Outdated infrastructure
TAMPs should be constantly evolving with the wealth management landscape, bringing development teams, trading teams, and operations teams together to develop new capabilities in response to  feedback and suggestions from their clients. A TAMP that’s unwilling, or unable, to adapt will in turn fail to help advisors future-proof their businesses.

3. An inability to scale with your growth
Do they grow with you as your AUM grows? Ideally, a TAMP will help you grow by enabling you to focus on deepening your current client relationships and building new ones. And as you do, your TAMP should be able to provide platform services and responsive, tiered pricing options that adjust seamlessly to your new needs.

4. Siloed workflows
Do they have integrated systems on their platform? When TAMPs build their own technology from the ground up using components designed to work together, advisors are able to run their entire practices through a single portal, from portfolio construction to reporting to billing.

5. Lack of service and support 
Do you have a dedicated consultant or relationship manager, or does your firm get shuffled around to different 1-800 numbers when you have questions? Does the TAMP work with you to identify the tasks that make most sense to outsource, or do they expect you to conform your business to their one-size-fits-all model?