Managed accounts may be the au courant vehicle with which to gather assets, but they are a nightmare to run. Or so say most industry players. One of the problems has been coordinating the various types of products -- fund wraps, separate accounts, brokerage wraps, variable annuity products and MDAs -- on the back-end. Often, the platforms will not easily share information, leaving advisors and investors with a jumble of information. Now PFPC says it has a solution to these problems, a unified managed account platform.

The back-office specialist has rolled out what it is calling AssetDirections. The platform offers a customized and private-labeled solution for managed account sponsors and provides a common, Web-based point of entry for the sponsor, advisors and investors through which they can access accounts, make transactions and check the performance for all of their managed accounts.

PFPC announced the offering a day after Nationwide became the first program sponsor to go public with a product based on it. Nationwide is offering a managed account program featuring mutual funds and variable annuities from its Best of America brand built on the PFPC AssetDirections platform.

"We have been working on this in stealth mode since early last year," said Jim McCoy, director of sales and marketing, for PFPC's managed account services group. "One motivating factor for us has been the need clients have expressed for a unified platform. We have continuously heard that someone had to come to the table with a platform that covered all of the account types."

PFPC is targeting broker-dealers, larger fund firms and banks with their own distribution for the product. "We offer them everything that they need to get up and running," explained McCoy. He hesitates, though, to call the product a turnkey solution, as he is afraid that the term misses the amount of customization and flexibility the product allows.

"We are working with the very largest providers, and they are used to having a deep-involvement in the product," said McCoy. PFPC does bring most of what a provider needs to offer a managed account program, said McCoy. While the sponsor may want to use its own staff for investment selection and to create suitability guidelines, it will not have to bring much else to the table besides a sales force.

With AssetDirections, the program sponsor will be able to select the asset managers offered in the program and work with a custodian that it chooses. It will also have control over the branding of the service. PFPC provides a Web-based front end, performance reporting, tax lot tracking, and recordkeeping. It can also handle trading or the program sponsor can have a custodian handle trading. PFPC joined with AdvisorPort last summer as it built the product to add the multi-product component to its service. By that time both Morningstar and Neuberger and Berman had already tapped PFPC to provide their underlying platforms for mutual fund wrap products. PFPC's does continue to use some components of CheckFree's APL platform for the product as well as capabilities it developed in house and the components from AdvisorPort.

McCoy added that PFPC will also provide training and internal wholesalers for platform providers seeking help with getting their sales team up to speed with the product. 

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