Windsor, Ont.-based Sterling Mutuals Inc. has become the first mutual fund dealer to give its financial advisors access to advisorDuo, Toronto-based Invesco Canada Ltd.’s new digital wealth-management platform.
“AdvisorDuo has the potential to be a game changer for us,” says Nelson Cheng, CEO of Sterling Mutuals, in a statement. “It has the capacity to increase the reach and productivity of our advisors while enabling us to benefit from the ever-increasing number of investors who prefer to work with a financial advisor.”
Launched last week, advisorDuo is a robo-advisor platform that’s available exclusively to advisors and their clients. Furthermore, advisors can only access advisorDuo if their dealers have signed an agreement with Invesco Canada.
Read: Invesco launches advisorDuo
The platform will help Sterling meet several objectives, says Cheng, in that it will give the dealer’s 250 mutual fund-licensed advisors access to ETFs while also helping them meet all of their regulatory obligations when signing up a new client.
More specifically, advisorDuo provides a digital onboarding process for advisors. As part of the process, new clients enter in the relevant information required for opening an account via a smartphone, tablet or computer either on their own time or with their advisor. As well, the new clients can be guided through some basic goals-based planning via a questionnaire. All the required documents are delivered and signed electronically.
“Anything that helps advisors to get the paperwork done more accurately is always a good thing,” says Cheng in an interview with Investment Executive.
Once all questions are completed, the platform recommends one of five target-risk portfolios. These portfolios, which range from conservative to high growth, consist of ETFs wrapped in a mutual fund structure. Advisors can decide how much of a client’s assets to allocate to the recommended portfolio.
Sterling is currently running a test pilot project of advisorDuo with intentions of rolling out the new platform to its entire advisor force by mid-December.
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