The End for Morningstar Office
Morningstar this week announced the retirement of its Office platform product for advisors and a partnership with SS&C Black Diamond.
Black Diamond will deeply integrated with Morningstar’s new Direct Advisory Suite—described as the “next phase of [Morningstar] Advisor Workstation,” according to a company statement.
While the timing and financial aspects of the move remain unclear, Morningstar has worked with the team at Black Diamond on a transition that has been customized to Office users who will continue to have access to the data and research from Morningstar.
The new partnership will combine investment data and research, portfolio construction and holdings-based analysis, and client engagement capabilities from the Direct Advisory Suite with portfolio accounting, client communications, compliance, trading and rebalancing, data aggregation, and performance reporting in Black Diamond.
Now Available, BetaNXT’s DataXChange
BetaNXT’s DataXChange platform has come out of beta after a pilot with several early adopter client firms.
Now broadly available, the platform, powered by Snowflake, is launching three months ahead of schedule.
Many, if not most, wealth management firms are struggling with bringing all their data—proprietary data from their many different applications and platforms, third-party data and market data—together in one place to not only provide insights or apply analytics to it for working with clients but also for business intelligence.
The DataXChange is meant as the first phase of such efforts, helping firms transition quickly (days or a week rather than months) to an open, data-agnostic cloud-based framework.
BetaNXT has built a foundation that adheres to industry security standards, allows for automating processes around data handling and management and features the ability to aggregate, reconcile and commingle data from different and possibly disparate sources.
LIMRA launches AI guides
The Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association’s AI Governance Group has launched a series of Turnkey Templates & Strategic Guides to help U.S. life insurance companies implement AI into their businesses.
These templates provide frameworks for companies and include cost-benefit analysis templates meant to help firm leaders identify the potential benefits and risks when considering the development or rollout of AI. The group plans to release several more industry frameworks in 2025.
To create the frameworks, the group gathered expertise from over 100 business and technology executives representing more than 50 U.S.-based member insurance companies, according to a prepared statement.