Unified managed accounts now account for just 6 percent of the overall separately managed accounts (SMAs) market, but it surely ranks as one of the fastest growing niches. In some ways, it's breathing new life into the SMA industry.We're seeing lots of wirehouses and discount brokerages are jumping on the trend.

Edward Jones, for example, said recently that it will launch such a program by the end of summer. The new program is designed to better compete with the likes of Fidelity and E*trade as well as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.  The popularity of this product has reached beyond what the technology infrastructure can support in some ways, a problem that the industry is now starting to address.The industry recognizes that it needs standards that would allow for easy interoperability across the industry--the overlay managers, the custodians and the model managers.

The DTCC senses opportunity and has plans to launch a communications hub called the Model Management Exchange later this year, which would implement standards set by the Money Management Institute. The idea here is to streamline the entire process by which a model manager would communicate with various overlay managers, which would then execute portfolio changes in specific accounts. There's plenty of room for error, and the chances that portfolio changes will not be caught quickly go higher. We're also seeing more vendor solutions from the likes of Vestmark, which just released its VestmarkOne unified Unified Wealth Management Platform. Fiserv has just added a unified managed household account platform.

For more:
- here's the article from Securities Technology Monitor 

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