Bridging Financial Planning and Asset Management with Nebo Wealth
Innovative Platform Empowers Advisors to Deliver Personalized Portfolios and Redefine Risk for Investors
“Without having MATLAB and the [App] Designer available to us to easily create a web-based application and iterate very rapidly as we get user feedback, it’s probably fair to say that Nebo Wealth would not exist.”
Key Outcomes
- Bridging the Gap: Nebo Wealth successfully addressed the long-standing challenge of aligning financial planning with asset management, providing a scalable solution that offers personalized portfolio management for financial advisors.
- Innovative Approach: By redefining risk and leveraging MATLAB App Designer, Nebo Wealth developed a platform that allows advisors to create customized portfolios based on clients’ unique financial goals and needs.
- Significant Impact: The platform has improved client experience, enabling advisors to offer highly personalized investment strategies without increasing resource demands, thus setting a new standard in wealth management.
For financial services firms, bridging the gap between financial planning and asset management has long been a significant challenge. This is because financial advisors often struggle to align their clients’ financial plans with their investment portfolios.
Nebo Wealth, an award-winning platform incubated within the mature asset management firm GMO, represents a new approach to goals-based investing. With the help of MATLAB®, Nebo Wealth redefines risk, shifting from traditional volatility-based models to a client-centric approach—ensuring investors have the necessary resources precisely when they need them.
Nebo Wealth’s journey began over a decade ago when Dr. Martin Tarlie, then part of GMO’s equity group, was tasked with exploring glide paths for a large corporate client. It quickly became apparent that existing models did not adequately explain or address the real risks faced by asset owners. This realization led Dr. Tarlie and his colleague, Ben Inker, to redefine risk and asset allocation, focusing on ensuring clients have the necessary resources at critical times.
To commercialize this new approach, Nebo Wealth needed a platform that allowed financial advisors to build their own portfolios. The solution was found in MATLAB App Designer, which enabled the rapid development of a web-based application and platform. This platform allowed advisors to create personalized portfolios for their clients, integrating financial planning inputs with asset management strategies. The platform integrates seamlessly with major financial planning tools such as MoneyGuidePro, eMoney Advisor, and RightCapital, allowing for both simple and enhanced financial planning. The flexibility of MATLAB enabled Nebo Wealth to develop text-based versions of its applications, facilitating easy integration with Git™-based versioning software. This allowed for efficient tracking of changes and rapid iteration based on user feedback.
The impact of Nebo Wealth’s platform has been significant. By addressing the gap between financial planning and asset management, Nebo Wealth has empowered financial advisors to offer personalized, scalable portfolio management solutions. Advisors can now create unique, customized portfolios for each client, enhancing the client experience without increasing resource demands.
According to Dr. Tarlie, feedback from users has been positive; for example, one user went from being able to create five unique personalized model portfolios per client to 100, elevating client experience in a scalable way.
