Fixed income intelligence and portfolio management start-up YieldX is now officially integrated into the Schwab Advisor Center, according to an announcement. The firm’s availability in the form of a third-party integration with Schwab comes after the firm entered the wealth management market in 2020, the latter closed its Series A investment round a year later, led by Envestnet, and more recently Added Emony Advisor Edmund Walters to its advisory board in 2012. ,
YieldX is designed to bring automation and transparency to the world of fixed income. The firm started with an analytics tool to examine and identify fixed income assets, another tool to build customized fixed income portfolios and an algorithm to balance income or yield target targets against risk and expense ratios. based facility.
It has since added a tool to build bond ladders and another algorithm to identify optimization opportunities within existing fixed income portfolios to improve the portfolio’s overall yield or reduce volatility risk.
YieldX has proven valuable to clients with corporate cash and cash on hand, said Blake Fellows, president of Fellow Financial Group, a $200 million AUM firm based in Leesburg, Va. and joined with Wealthcare Advisory Partners.
Instead of relying on the firm’s own research and legwork to build a short-term, state-specific muni bond ladder, advisors can use YieldX to not only conduct research, but also provide clients with information in a more user-friendly interface, he said. can present. , The tool “completes what we were doing before, all in one place, all in one platform.”
“It was easy to use and easy to understand,” he explained. YieldX “offers more certainty with respect to access to your capital, but also gets a rate of return to at least compete with inflation, if not try and beat it. Right now, that’s a huge topic.” Is.”
When the equipment debuted, a consultant estimated that firms using the equipment would need a strong fixed income business with $5 to $10 million of new assets to justify the cost of YieldX, which had The cost is $10,000 per seat per year. Enterprise License.
Fellows said the cost to his firm is reasonable, as the value-add provided by helping clients with their corporate cash provides opportunities to generate new revenue in areas such as wallet share and insurance. “It’s more than just a fee generator,” he said of YieldX.
While YieldX’s integration with Schwab isn’t going to make or break its use of the tool, it does make the tool more convenient, Fellows said.
