This Year’s Innovations for Integrations

As we all know, 2020 has been one for the books. It’s been remarkable to witness people and businesses finding new ways to accomplish the goals they set to achieve. The financial technology (fintech) industry has been no exception. United by the mission to support advisors with seamlessly connected, productivity-enhancing solutions, fintech remains driven to continue the pace of innovation in the integrations space.  In fact, the Black Diamond^® Wealth Platform team and its outside, partner solutions from across the industry have continued to work together to ensure working together is possible in a dispersed world. 

Take a look at some of the 2020 enhancement highlights for Black Diamond integrations:

Integration Network Growth:  Each year the Black Diamond integration network expands. Learning about and collaborating with new and emerging companies who want to solve problems for advisors alongside Black Diamond is what I love best about my job. This year that momentum didn’t slow down.

Fourteen new integration partners joined the Black Diamond network across a wide variety of categories. For example, Act Analytics became the first Black Diamond integration completely dedicated to ESG investing. And, DPL Financial Partners is powering the new SS&C Advent Insurance Marketplace to provide clients with complimentary access to a wide range of fee-only insurance solutions.

In addition to the new, a deeper relationship with SmartRIA was announced so Black Diamond can work even closer with them to help firms simplify their compliance oversight. 

I invite you to visit the partners and integrations page on this site to see the entire network.

New Home for Integrations:  Firms can now manage their existing integrations and discover new solutions all from one central hub within Black Diamond. Through the Partner Sites space, integrations such as Single-Sign-On (SSO) can be configured, and there’s direct access to related support documentation. The ability to specify partner links to be included in the navigation menu is also allowing firms to customize the platform to fit their specific technology stack.

CRM Framework Updates: Notably released this year, was an updated CRM integration framework designed to support the new Client View application where advisors can manage the entirety of their client relationships. Redtail CRM was the first to leverage this enhanced connection. This new framework supports the automatic importing and syncing of contacts from the CRM and keeps those contacts up to date in Black Diamond. Thus, eliminating duplicated manual work for advisors. I’m looking forward to rolling out this integration with other CRMs in 2021.

Custodial Enhancements: Custodial integrations are always a focus since they offer significant daily workflow efficiencies for advisors. This year’s enhancements included straight-through management fee processing for advisor billing, automatic syncing of RMD information for easier tracking, as well as a number of direct access workflow connections so advisors can easily move to their custodial portal from Black Diamond. The existing and popular custodial statement import to the Client Experience portal was enhanced to fully automate and distribute statements directly to the client’s vault.

Timeline Adoption: Black Diamond is known for helping advisors enhance and enrich client relationships. The Relationship Timeline in the Client Experience portal is one tool that empowers advisors and clients to connect. This communication web feed can document and celebrate financial successes, share updates, provide market commentary, and more. In 2020, Timeline functionality expanded to include integration partners.  This integration capability allows advisors to incorporate third party content natively into Timeline from the solution they are working in. Several integration partners have already rolled out this feature including RightCapital, Asset-Map, and Redtail, and more are on the way.

These highlights detail just a portion of all the great integration work completed this year. The Black Diamond integrations team is continuously working to deliver meaningful, productivity-enhancing connections that provide firms with a smooth and efficient experience across their entire technology stack.

To learn more about how Black Diamond integrates with complementary solutions, request a personalized demo today. You may also visit this page to see the entire network.