OpenWealth® Meets UMA Sponsors’ Operational Challenges Identified by Cerulli

Citi today reported that OpenWealth^®, its market-leading service solution for wealth managers, fully addresses the operational concerns of sponsors with Unified Managed Accounts (UMA) as detailed in a recent Cerulli Associates research report.

The report, The Cerulli Edge, Managed Accounts Edition, 3Q11, identified a number of operational concerns sponsors have raised in response to changes in the managed accounts business and their need to reduce administrative burdens to better focus on core competencies — building relationships and asset growth.

"To best serve our clients’ investment management needs, we needed automated portfolio rebalancing and overlay combined with pre-trade operational and compliance oversight in a single integrated platform,” said Jason Creel, Managing Director and Head of Managed Accounts at TIAA-CREF. "OpenWealth delivered that capability and more which is especially important today given the increased regulatory oversight of managed accounts.”

Citi’s OpenWealth industry leading UMA/UMH capabilities, in production since 2009, supports sponsor firms in addressing all the key issues that were cited to improve managed accounts operations, such as:

• customer profiling and proposal generation
• trade order management
• portfolio rebalancing
• pre-trade portfolio review and restriction management
• overlay automation
• fee billing
• portfolio accounting.

Sponsor firms have started to recognize the advantages of Citi OpenWealth’s end-to-end solution with household rebalancing and aggregation capabilities. "OpenWealth seamlessly aggregates household level data across wealth management platforms, investment managers and third-party custodians, and offers award-winning unified household rebalancing and tax optimization capabilities,” says, Chandresh Iyer, Head of Investment Administration Services and Global Custody, Securities and Fund Services, Citi. "We offer our clients a front-to-back solution that addresses requisite pre-trade review as well as the operational and administrative burdens identified in the Cerulli report.”

• OpenWealth’s profiling and proposal generation tools are fully integrated with investor suitability, portfolio construction, rebalancing and reporting, thus ensuring that sponsors deliver a consistent investor experience and reduced portfolio implementation errors
• Integrated Trade Order Management system with connectivity to 400 trading and custodial destinations allows for flexible and highly automated trading options
• Addressing concerns related to portfolio investment restriction, the platform integrates pre-trade guardrails for advisors, robust investor and firm restrictions and adherence to customizable pre-trade portfolio investment rules, with automated pre-trade alerts to ensure advisors and portfolios operate within firm and investor defined parameters
• Integrated, automated overlay management tools and resources support both UMA and UMH structures, eliminating additional expense while simultaneously supporting any configuration of rep managed, firm managed and 3^rd party UMA/UMH portfolios
• Automated rebalancing options, easily supporting calendar, activity or model change rebalancing schedules
• Automated transition management tools with tax optimization supporting legacy holdings
• Automated fee billing at the sleeve level to support, a variety of fee schedules applied to various asset types and manager models within the UMA/UMH.

Through its Securities and Fund Services business, Citi’s industry-focused experts provide institutional investors worldwide with tailored solutions delivered through proven global platforms that feature modular, open architecture. With $12.5 trillion of assets under custody and the industry’s largest proprietary network, clients can leverage Citi’s local market expertise and global reach to extract value across the entire investment value chain.

Global Transaction Services, a division of Citi’s Institutional Clients Group, offers integrated cash management, trade, and securities and fund services to multinational corporations, financial institutions and public sector organizations around the world. With a network that spans more than 100 countries, Citigroup’s Global Transaction Services supports over 65,000 clients. As of the third quarter of 2011, it held on average $365 billion in liability balances and $12.5 trillion in assets under custody.

About Citi

Citi, the leading global financial services company, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

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