Manufacturer Vs Distributor
An advisor from Wizzer Beta community called. He knows about our CastleGate Quant — the Quant Advisory active on Wizzer. He was appreciating the two products — Dual Momentum and Multi Factor portfolio.
And then we spoke about our in-house production studio being setup to educate the community about our product. He made a basic point — if you develop a community then just be intro distribution rather than building quant products.
I was alert — why is this persona recommending I shift to another persona. He himself is an advisor.
So it turns out that for his own distribution he has tied up with multiple wealth advisors and they take half the fees. While he serves the client whole year. Granted the WAs have a relationship and service the clients (mostly their feelings) but still it’s a big commercial diachotomy.
To Build Or To Sell
But where it opened up in my mind was a description of Miles Software , now acquired by EBix , from someone who said they built a lot of pipelines from product manufacturers so WAs could just operate. it just works
It was meeting our conceptual framework for MF Advisory feature — where an advisor can issue advices to buy mutual funds, maintain portfolio, switch, withdrawl, exit , rebalance, dividend gauge and occsionally leverage.
From there on the leap to which asset class next
is a short distance. The investment plan
becoming portfolio construction
. The allocation in portfolio becoming own products
vs third party products
is a matter of mix. An advisor at that point becomes a distributor. A product manufacturer becomes a wealth advisor.
The value of our product is going to be in offering fluidity of commercial persona.