Model Portfolio & SMA Strategists Showcase - Flipbook - Page 16
SMAs & MODEL PORTFOLIOS
investment management off an advisor’s
desk so they can focus on the business,
but they’re a trade-off rather than a
cure-all. The advisor still has to select
the right models and structure for each
client. Choosing a TAMP is a technology
and operations decision.
Choosing what runs on that TAMP
is a completely separate investment
decision, and conflating the two is
one of the more common mistakes
advisors make when adopting one of
these platforms for the first time.
WHERE TAMPS ARE HEADED
Three developments are worth
watching because they’ll reshape
what “outsourcing” means over the
next few years. First, private-markets
access is moving into mainstream
TAMP infrastructure rather than staying
confined to UHNW-only platforms. At
least one major provider has recently
launched turnkey model portfolios
with embedded private equity,
private credit, and private real estate
allocations, available to RIAs and
broker-dealers through an established
TAMP relationship, a meaningful shift
from the public-securities-only models
that defined this space for most of the
last decade.
The Scale Driving
TAMP Adoption
16,544
SEC-registered RIAs
$176.8T
Total AUM managed
73.7M
Clients served
Newer, more technology-forward
TAMP entrants have moved just as
+22%
WATCH OUT FOR
Two decisions,
not one
Choosing a TAMP is a technology
decision. Choosing what runs on it is an
investment decision. Advisors who let one
platform’s model shelf quietly become
their entire due-diligence process
have let an operations choice make an
investment choice for them. Keep the two
separate on purpose.
Asset growth, single year
Source: InvestmentNews, citing 2025 RIA
industry benchmarking data
quickly on this front as the largest
incumbents, partnering directly with
private-markets managers to bring
these allocations into standard model
portfolios. Second, tax-optimization
technology that used to be a premium,
UMA-only feature is increasingly being
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built into the base TAMP layer itself,
which has direct implications for the
SMA-versus-UMA decision covered
earlier (p. 12). As the platform gets
better at tax management regardless
of account structure, some of that
decision’s stakes start to shrink.
Third, generative AI is beginning to
show up directly in the advisor-facing
layer of these platforms, automatically
drafting client-ready portfolio
commentary and meeting preparation
materials from the underlying account
data, rather than requiring an advisor
to write that narrative by hand for
every review. This is early-stage and
worth watching rather than treating as
settled, but it’s a real trend rather than
a speculative one.
DUE DILIGENCE SPECIFIC TO
ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS
INSIDE A MODEL
The private-markets trend above
deserves its own due-diligence caution,
since an alternative asset embedded
inside an otherwise familiar model
portfolio doesn’t automatically carry the
liquidity or transparency an advisor is
used to evaluating. Three considerations
matter enough to name directly rather
than assume they carry over from the
equity and fixed-income due diligence
covered elsewhere in this guide.
Redemption terms deserve explicit
attention. Many semiliquid privatemarkets vehicles embedded in model
portfolios offer only periodic, often
quarterly, redemption windows,
sometimes subject to a cap on the
total percentage of the fund that can
be redeemed in any given period. A
client who needs unplanned liquidity
from an account holding one of these
allocations may simply not be able
to get it on the timeline they expect,
regardless of how the rest of the model
behaves. This needs to be understood
