Silver Brings Clarity to Cost Basis and Fee Billing

​​​​Investment services cost basis and advisory fee calculations can be far from obvious – particularly when trying to understand a tax lot with cost adjusted by several factors and a tangled web of wash sales or trying to pull apart a fee calculation based on multiple interacting schedules, breakpoints, overrides, and exclusions. To help middle-office operations professionals, advisors, and investors better understand critical and complex information, Silver Management Group, Inc. is excited to announce the upcoming release of innovative Clarity Explainers as part of its enterprise Cost Basis and Fee Billing Solutions.  

Designed to present a clear, step-by-step view of complicated calculations, Silver’s Clarity Explainers significantly improve operations and customer support productivity and enhance investor confidence. End results by themselves are no longer enough – Clarity effectively turns the system inside out to illustrate all steps leading to a certain cost basis or fee billing result in easily understandable tabular, graphical, and natural language form so that operations staff can quickly address issues, advisors and customer support staff can quickly answer investor questions, and investors can quickly grasp the details of their cost basis or fee information.

"Everything required to help customers is right at the user's fingertips without requiring in-depth training or expensive subject matter expertise."

Jason Vogel, Senior Director, Product Strategy and Development

“Clarity Explainers surface our systems’ deep detailed information in ways that allow operations users to recognize where a cost basis or fee billing issue occurred and address it immediately in real-time,” according to Jason Vogel, Senior Director of Product Strategy and Development. “While developing these features, we focused intently on service center and tax reporting support calls and made sure to provide critical, related information like a merger’s ratios or the impact of a fee exclusion. Everything required to help customers is right at the user’s fingertips without requiring in-depth training or expensive subject matter expertise."

By leveraging Silver’s flexible APIs and widgets, client firms can expose Clarity directly to their account holders. “We began with the aim of cutting operations and call center effort by half but soon recognized our clients can empower account holders directly by extending Clarity views to customer portals and statements. Doing so can eliminate a large portion of calls related to cost basis reporting and fee billing calculations,” says Eric Jacobson, Director of Client Relations. Additionally, regulatory changes such as the DOL fiduciary rule continue the push for greater transparency. Jacobson adds “More and more, investment services firms are being required to present customer data in easily understandable ways. Silver’s Clarity Explainers on customer portals and statements are a great way to achieve this compliance goal.”

About Silver Management Group, Inc.

Silver is a leading provider of business and technology solutions for the investment services industry. The Silver team applies decades of securities industry and software development experience, along with a passion for solving real-world problems, to deliver cost-effective brokerage operations and wealth management solutions for our clients. Silver's strategic partners provide complementary services, software, and market data to enhance Silver solutions. Silver's proprietary software solutions are currently used by some of the world's most respected financial institutions to process tens of millions of investment accounts and more than $1 trillion in assets.

For more information, please call (800) 319-6865 or visit www.silvermanagement.com.

Source: Silver Management Group, Inc.