Orion Expands Capabilities to Help Advisors Capture Opportunities with Affluent Clients Through Highly Personalized Services

February 05, 2025 at 09:30 AM EST

Great Wealth Transfer accelerates demand for bespoke reporting, estate planning, trust accounting and foreign exchange solutions

Orion, the premier provider of transformative wealthtech solutions for financial advisors and the enterprise firms that serve them, announced today at Orion Ascent numerous platform-wide enhancements to aid financial advisors in serving high- and ultra-high-net-worth (HNW/UHNW) clients and multi-family offices. With $124 trillion expected to change hands through 2045, the influx of new millionaires will demand highly personalized financial solutions to manage, protect and grow their wealth.

Orion’s 2025 Advisor Wealthtech Survey reveals that nearly half (47%) of advisors plan to expand their offerings in 2025 to attract high-net-worth clients, including services like estate planning, direct indexing, and trust accounting. However, Orion’s parallel Investor Survey highlights a significant disconnect: while 49% of advisors currently offer estate and trust planning, only 35% of investors are aware that their advisors provide these services. This gap presents a valuable opportunity for enhanced investor education and more effective communication.

“With a massive generational wealth transfer underway, advisors are facing unprecedented opportunities alongside increasing complexities,” said Ron Pruitt, President of Orion Wealth Management. “At Orion, we’re dedicated to equipping advisors with the personalized tools they need to deliver bespoke experiences—an essential advantage when serving high-net-worth investors and multi-family offices.”

Orion’s new tools and enhancements are tailored to the complex needs of this important investor segment and directly address top requests from advisors, including:

Summit platform integration: Orion recently completed its acquisition of Summit Wealth Systems, known for its modern and intuitive client reporting and portfolio management solutions that appeal to large RIAs and family offices serving HNW investors. At Ascent, advisors are exploring Summit through product demos. Soon, Summit will be fully integrated into Orion's platform, offering RIAs powerful, highly personalized tools to build deeper client relationships.
Comprehensive estate and tax planning: A new streamlined estate planning workflow offers beneficiary reviews, document upload, flow charts, and scenario modeling to address federal and state-level estate taxes and community property nuances. A new donor-advised fund capability simplifies charitable giving by allowing advisors to model annual and at-passing contributions, aligning tax and legacy strategies with client goals. Finally, with itemized deduction modeling, advisors can seamlessly calculate the higher of standard or itemized deductions, incorporating pre- and post-retirement methods, inflation adjustments, and key deductions like SALT, charitable giving and mortgage interest for precise tax planning.
Foreign exchange: New foreign exchange capabilities support 100 different currencies, domiciled by country, addressing the cross-border financial interests of HNW/UHNW clients. Family offices also benefit from advanced reporting for illiquid investments, including alternatives and physical assets like art, wine or car collections.
Trust accounting: Orion’s enhanced trust accounting reporting capabilities now include principal and income (P&I) allocations, trustee and beneficiary visibility, and ownership details down to the decimal level. These updates provide greater transparency and accuracy for managing complex trusts.
Trust Account trading: Orion has expanded its platform trading tool capabilities to support comprehensive Trust Account trading by institutional bank and trust firms. Recent enhancements to Orion Trading now fully support delivery versus payment (DVP) settlement, enabling advisors to seamlessly trade across both Trust and standard settlement accounts within a single, integrated solution. These enhancements provide real-time Compliance oversight, automated trade routing direct to the custodian or trade away to an executing broker via the FIX protocol, sophisticated block trade capabilities, and direct connectivity to the Central Trade Matching (CTM) platform for automated allocation and affirmation across multiple asset classes globally.
Outsourced Chief Investment Officer: Orion OCIO offers high-touch, white glove investment management services that are highly rated by advisors. By outsourcing capabilities such as research, manager due diligence, investment strategy recommendations, model portfolio construction, trading, portfolio management, rebalancing, and reporting to Orion OCIO, firms can fuel their growth with HNW and UHNW investors. This allows advisors to streamline their business processes and dedicate more time to meeting the unique needs of their HNW clients.

“Orion’s Investor Survey reveals that over 40% of high-net-worth investors want their advisor to offer more services, presenting a significant opportunity for advisors to meet growing demands and expand their business. With the Great Wealth Transfer underway, advisors offering comprehensive estate and trust planning can become indispensable partners,” said Chris Shutler, Head of Strategy, Orion. “For investors who use the estate and trust planning offered by their financial advisors, 91% use these services to transfer wealth, while only 31% use them to receive wealth. By bridging the gap between available services and investor awareness, advisors can capture a larger share of the high-net-worth market and drive substantial growth.”

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About Orion

Orion is a premier provider of the tech-enabled fiduciary process that transforms the advisor-client relationship by enabling financial advisors to Prospect, Plan, Invest, and Achieve within a single, connected, technology-driven experience. Combined, our brand entities, Orion Advisor Tech, Orion Portfolio Solutions, Brinker Capital Investments, Redtail Technology, and Orion OCIO create a complete offering that empowers firms to attract new clients seamlessly, connect goals more meaningfully to investment strategies and outcomes, and ultimately track progress toward each investor’s unique definition of financial success. Orion services $4.9 trillion in assets under administration and $97.5 billion of wealth management platform assets (as of December 31, 2024) and supports over seven million technology accounts and thousands of independent advisory firms. Today, 17 out of the Top 20 Barron’s RIA firms¹ rely on Orion’s technology to power their businesses and win for investors. Learn more at Orion.com.

¹ Source: 2024 Top 100 RIA Firms, Barron's, 2024.

Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) services offered by TownSquare Capital, LLC (“TSC”), an Orion Company. TSC is a registered investment advisor. Investment advisory services offered by Orion Portfolio Solutions, LLC (“OPS”), a registered investment advisor. OPS and TSC are affiliated companies through their parent company, Orion Advisor Solutions, Inc. (“Orion”).