Unified Managed Accounts (UMAs) are sold with key list of advantages. But if you don’t have the right underlying technology or managed account partner, you can’t seek to achieve all of these advantages and you may end up with some pretty tough challenges, and sometimes some pretty disappointed and frustrated clients, right? So while it’s not exactly flashy to talk about true sleeve tax-lot accounting….it’s critical to delivering the client outcomes you really want to create for your clients.
Are You With The Right UMA Partner?
By Barrett Ayers, President
Have you found yourself experiencing some of these challenges and wondering if you are with the right partner?:
- Inability to support fixed income or dually managed (hybrid) models
- Segregating cash amongst client cash, manager cash and cash pending withdrawals that are not partitioned and managed independently
- Dividends are not posted back to the sleeve in which they originated
- Manager Sleeve performance is inaccurate and varies significantly across clients
- Difficulties changing managers in a UMA. Selling and repurchasing overlapping security
- Inaccuracies around corporate actions
- Meaningful trade execution variance for the same trade across multiple custodians
- Inaccurate tax management results or limited tax management capabilities
- Insufficient coverage of your asset managers
- Challenges enrolling and transitioning accounts to the platform
Most of these issues are due to a platform’s inability to tag and partition tax lots. It takes time and experience to build a platform that handles – and partitions – a UMA properly. You can’t take shortcuts. Some people call it old school, we call it experience.
And we think you deserve better.
By Barrett Ayers, President