AMA: I'm Marc Fraser-Jones, Xplan Portfolio expert and product manager at Iress, Ask Me Anything!

Do you have a burning question about Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) capabilities in Xplan?

Join me here on Tuesday 13th August from 2pm to 2:30pm.

With years of experience helping advisers, paraplanners and licensees streamline their portfolio construction in Xplan, I’m here to help.

Start popping in your questions below and Ask Me Anything!

❗️Update: This AMA has now ended but please continue to pop your questions in the discussion forums and make sure you tag me at @marc.fraser-jones

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Comments

rainier.reyes

Welcome everyone to an Advisely Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread!

Here's how to get involved:

Submit Your Questions: Just type them out and post now ahead of the AMA! This is a text-based event, so no audio or video is needed. Whatever Xplan SMA questions you have, Marc will be here to answer during the scheduled time.
Be Respectful: Keep it friendly and professional. Respectful dialogue makes the AMA enjoyable and informative for everyone.
Stay Engaged: Feel free to follow up or ask about different topics as the thread goes on. The more you interact, the richer the conversation.
Enjoy the Experience: Use this opportunity to gain insights, share laughs, and connect. Let’s make this AMA one to remember!

Looking forward to all your amazing questions and let the asking begin!

An exclusive badge is also available for participation in the AMA!

mat.tenison3

Hi Marc, thanks for your tome today! Is it difficult to set up an SMA in IPS and wealth solver? Also, what do investments in reports look like when you have separate investments combined with an SMA under the one platform (wrap account)? Does it show the SMA separately or just list all the investments, including underlying SMA holdings under one list? Cheers!

DeanColinHolmes

Hey Marc, keen to learn more about CFS Edge and how XPLAN works together in the portfolio work.

Cheers, Dean

dela

Hi @marc.fraser-jones , very excited for this AMA. Can you please advise the best way to setup an SMA in Wealthsolver? We often have issues with the MER's or AA not flowing in for private labeled managed accounts. Thank you!

martin.joughin

How can I code a document to show what SMA's investments are in? I'm aware I can use row[‘sub_account’]. However this gives a code, not the name of the SMA. BT Panorama in particular gives the subaccount as accountnumber.01, accountnumber.02 etc. The number of the end is different for every client, so it's impossible to tell which SMA it is. The new Portfolio Position (Beta) screen is able to give names to all of the SMAs, so I'm hoping there's some code we can use.

charlene.thompson

Which platforms currently have the SMA at an account level in XPLAN functionality? Should it automatically be feed through or does the Advice Practice need to set the datafeed up a certain way for it to come through? Is there training on XPLAN around this new feature?

Which Platforms will have this functionality in XPLAN in the near future? Is Praemium still not on the list? If not, why not?

primrose.foster

What do you find is the most under-utilised feature in relation to Xplan's SMA modelling functionality? @marc.fraser-jones

melita

Hi Marc,

When a firm has their SMAs on multiple platforms and likes the 'look-through' option in IPS display so clients can see the underlying assets in their portfolio holdings, what is the most efficient way to run a report across all FUA that shows SMA penetration across platforms from the Xplan IPS data?

E.g. How much do we have in total in SMA1 vs SMA2 vs SMA3 across all platforms (Panorama, Macquarie, IOOF, CFS etc). Even better if we can see this at whole group/firm level plus have the ability to filter down to individual Adviser level as well.

luke.hanson

Within WealthSovlver, the internal SMA transaction costs don't show up (eg. SMA has 10 underlying ETFs and the platform charges 0.11% transactions costs to buy the holdings). Is there a way to see the costs and have them flow into the SOA?

ThomasChiu

Would be good to know if we can input the returns into XPLAN for SMAs which will come through to the Wealthsolver comparison as well as advice documents.

rainier.reyes

Hi everyone and welcome to today's AMA!

Please ensure you read the instructions above before you post.

In order to see new questions and responses, make sure you refresh the page regularly.

Let me know if you need any assistance!

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @mat.tenison3, thanks for kicking us off with the first question!

SMA investment options for the currently supported platforms are available in WealthSolver, in IPS the IressNet datafeed from the platform/vendor should handle everything for you. Transactions against holdings within an SMA will be tagged against a Sub Account with an SMA Investment attached. Once this data is present, the SMA handling we've built will automatically take place.

SMA fields have been added to the new Beta screens (you may need to enable them in the column chooser), you should be able to group your transactions, holdings and performance figures by SMA. Below is an example I've put together showing the above for the Position (Beta) screen.

When it comes to reports and data sources, we have had to tread very carefully. As such it required a lot of investigation and analysis, the reporting work is still in progress, we're currently aiming for the end of August, more info will be provided as the datasources get released.
However, the functionality should work in a similar way to the new screens, investments that aren't held inside an SMA will show up as direct investments.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @DeanColinHolmesCFS Edge investment options are available in WealthSolver, for clients that have existing CFS Edge SMA's via IressNet datafeed, they should already be visible in the client accounts via the new beta screens. You may need to enable the new fields via the column chooser, once enabled you can use the new fields to group the results on the screen.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @dela.dzadey

For private SMA's, users can contact our FundData team. FundData can create a shell for the options with fee and AA if a PDS is provided. Users can then use the option in WealthSolver scenario by adding the option via Add Investment or manually add the option to the plan.

If the site's data source is Funddata, the fee and AA will flow through. However, if the site's data source is IPS, users will need to maintain the fee and AA themselves in Portfolio > Maintenance > Products.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @martin.joughin, we have had to tread very carefully when it comes to reporting and datasources. Work is in progress and currently aiming to be completed for the end of August.

However, I can confirm there will be a couple of new datasources, in this case where you see sub_account available there will be a corresponding SMA Instrument field, which like the Position (Beta) screen will contain the name of the SMA. More information will be forthcoming as we release the work, we will provide sample code with this.

melita

We also have an issue with this re SMAs in Panorama. We have Xport reports that pull portfolio data including the SubAccount name and for other vendors/platforms this displays the correct SMA name however with Pano it's just numbers and gives no indication of the actual SMA that the asset is held in. In the new Beta screen i can see the SMA name in the Panorama portfolio but this beta field is not available to pull into our Xport reports. As is visible in the Beta screen Panorama is actually feeding the correct SMA name into Iressnet however there appears to be an inconsistency in mapping because it's not being mapped to the same 'Sub Account' field that other platforms/vendors are feeding the SMA name to. Could this inconsistency be corrected so that the SMA name from Panorama is mapped to the same consistent field as it is with Macquarie and other vendors? or failing that can the new beta field that houses the SMA name be made available to pull into Xport reports?

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @charlene, there should be no need to set the datafeed up in a certain way, as long as the data is provided by the platform/vendor to IressNet, with the SMA details, it should flow through into the site without any user intervention. You may need to enable the SMA fields via the column chooser in the new Beta screens, once enabled you can use the new fields to group the results on the screen.

The currently support platforms are:
AMP North
Macquarie Wrap
Macquarie Vision
Netwealth
BT Panorama
HUB24
Fiducian
IOOF Group
CFS Custom Solutions
CFS Edge
CFS First Choice (Note: In conjunction with CFS we have built vendor specific SMA handling for the CFS First Choice feed, holdings will be unrolled and displayed in underlying constituents while the rest of the SMAs are displayed in rolled-up level.)

Unfortunately at this point Praemium is not supported, they are currently using a file format that does not allow for the identification of SMA's

dela

Thank you so much!

charlene.thompson

Who could we contact to provide Praemium with the file format that is needed or an example or what other platforms are using to allow this data to feed through and sort by SMA?

melita

Can we please have a filter added to Security Positions search so that we can choose whether to include investments held within SMA or exclude investments held within SMA when doing a bulk security positions search. When a client holds the investment within the SMA the communication we send is quite different to when they hold the investment outside of the SMA and being able to search for clients who hold XYZ with blank sub_account (i.e. not in SMA) would be extremely useful.

At present we have to run a custom merge report from Security Positions to see the holdings with Sub-Account column then cross reference and tick on/off clients in the Security Positions search results to narrow the selected clients to just the ones who hold the investment outside of SMA before sending the comms. Highly inefficient and risk of human error which could be eliminated by having a filter at top of security positions to specify whether the position is held inside/outside of SMA.

If there's another way to do this i'd love to hear.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @luke.hanson, presently WealthSolver only does research on the top level SMA and at the platform level. As such, the cost for underlying ETFs is not available. Unfortunately this means the cost for underlying ETFs won't be available in the syntax.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @ThomasChiu , past performance in WealthSolver is calculated based on underlying data including unit prices and distribution data. This means past performance is not a simple input. If users were able to input the returns, it will be inconsistent with other options' past performance methodology.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @primrose.foster , it's still early days for SMA functionality within Xplan, so it's hard to draw solid conclusions around the utilisation of different features at the moment, that said it is something we're keeping track of.

However, I would like to encourage everyone to jump into the new beta portfolio screens and check them out, along with the SMA functionality we've added.

The beta program is a departure from how we've previously delivered functionality to our customers, giving us the ability to gain fast feedback from users during the process to help guide decisions. The more users we get on board using the new screens, the more feedback we can gather and the better our overall solution will be.

marc.fraser-jones

Iress is already in discussions with Praemium to enhance the datafeed to support. Our product manager for IressNet is managing this with Praemium.

marc.fraser-jones

Hi @melita.daff

Management reporting / business intelligence around SMA's is something we're currently considering. If you're interested I'd like to reach out to you directly to organise a research session to better understand your needs in this area.

marc.fraser-jones

The detail in SubAccount is dependant on what the vendor/platform provides us, with the work we've been doing for SMA we've added the new SMA fields to the front end. Our intention is to expose the SMA fields into report datasources so they can be pulled into Xport, which should resolve this situation. This work is currently in progress, as it becomes available we'll provide further information in release notes.

marc.fraser-jones

@melita.daff this is another area we have under consideration at the moment, it would be great if we could cover this in the research session as well

melita

Thank you @marc.fraser-jones

melita

@marc.fraser-jones . Absolutely, that would be appreciated.