Furthering the Fixed Income Revolution: FAQs

Recently, we hosted a webinar exploring the rapid digitization of fixed income trading, data and investments to help advisors understand how they can leverage YieldX technology to build more personalized portfolios at scale. 

Ben Hurn, SVP of Channel Business Development, and Tom Bradley, Managing Director and Head of Fixed Income, walked through a demo of the YieldX platform and highlighted a number of use cases for our pre-built workflows, automations and no-code applications.

By the way, if you missed the webinar live, you can catch the full recording on demand here!

During the webinar, we received a number of insightful questions from attendees that we wanted to answer here for our entire audience. 

Furthering the Fixed Income Revolution Q&A:

Q: Can I construct a portfolio relative to a model portfolio?

A: There are several ways to do this with YieldX:  

With the YieldX Assert Explorer application, you have access to a library containing over two million securities and over 30 filtering options that allow you to build over top of existing models, or build personalized model sleeves as part of a UMA approach. 

With YieldX InPaaS, you can quickly build fund-based models to compare to held away models on a yield/income, risk, and relative cost, or to add custom sleeves to existing models.

YieldX Optimizer is another area where we provide actionable, security level insights for your existing models. YieldX Optimizer also gives you the ability to run batch optimizations if you are looking for opportunities to maximize your yield or minimize risk across a suite of models you are already managing. 

Q: Who supplies your corporate bond liquidity?

A: We source liquidity data from a variety of market venues and institutional partners. YieldX generates “executable” portfolios based on the liquidity of the underlying bonds at specific venues or through a period of time. We don’t represent any single broker’s liquidity, nor do we add any commissions or markups to levels observed on the platform. We are totally agnostic as to the advisor’s choice of execution venue after they have constructed portfolios using YieldX.

Q: Are you integrated today with Envestnet where they will trade these portfolios?

A: We are currently integrated with Envestnet Enterprise and available to clients via SSO on the Envestnet platform. Later this year, we will be more deeply integrated with Envestnet Tamarac.

In terms of portfolio execution, YieldX can clear and custody through Apex, but no user is required to clear trades through us.  Both inside and outside of Envestnet we can help facilitate order routing to your clearing/custody of choice, be it Schwab, Pershing, Fidelity, or others. 

Q: How do you determine the liquidity of a bond? Do you use liquidity scores and if so, from where?

A: We curate a heatmap of liquidity based on a number of factors, including but not limited to live actionable liquidity in the market, historical daily volumes and third-party provided liquidity metrics.

Q: Can equities be included in accounts and locked for current portfolios? Or is this strictly for bonds and bond funds?

A: Today, YieldX carries all equity mutual funds, ETFs, and closed end funds within our Asset Explorer library and we will soon have single application workflows for equity portfolio construction. 

Q: Are your bond analytics in-house or are you using third party?

A: Our asset level analytics are derived from Refintiv/Lipper and other institutional grade providers. Our portfolio level analytics and optimizations are derived from proprietary risk factor models and APIs.

Q: What is the cost associated with YieldX?

A: We have multiple pricing models for our various delivery capabilities.  In the case of our SaaS platform for enterprises, our pricing typically consists of a platform fee and a per seat cost at the advisor level, or usage based fees.  

We also have a separate tiered model for API pricing, and another pricing model for delivery of custom investment products such as model portfolios, ETFs, or white labeled SMAs, which is typically done under a basis point structure. 

Within our Envestnet strategic partnership, associated Envestnet clients receive discounts relative to our standard pricing. 

If you have additional questions we didn’t cover, get in touch with us here!