Planner seeks way around XPlan’s $50,000 minimum

Financial planner with Avenue Capital Management (ACM), Andrew Hungerford, is working with XPlan to customise and further simplify share adjustment procedures within clients’ self-managed accounts (SMAs).

Hungerford, who works at ACM Bowral in NSW, rated the desktop software highly and expected it could be changed to aggregate share balances of less than $50,000, which would eliminate the need for additional Bowral ACM-written software, and make adjustments to SMA clients’ portfolios more fluid. Under the current system, changes to clients’ share holdings in sub-funds within their SMAs –such as Australian equities or Australian small caps – are entered initially into XPlan, which compiles a report. Report data is then entered into proprietary software written by Bowral ACM that aggregates clients’ shares into $50,000 parcels and sends them through the IRESS Ordering System (IOS) to a brokerage house, where an administrator completes the requested transaction. The Bowral ACM-written software is necessary since XPlan’s “minimum filter” will not transport share balances of less than $50,000, Hungerford said. “If someone wants to buy $30,000 in shares and someone else wants to buy $15,000 in shares, the total is $45,000. Under XPlan, nothing would happen. The minimum filter doesn’t aggregate trades of this size,” he said. XPlan and Hungerford aim to reduce the Bowral system’s minimum filter to zero so that balances of less than $50,000 can be aggregated without resorting to the Bowral ACM-written software. “We currently do the netting off in our system internally [but] we believe XPlan can do this internally…It would be better if we could do it all in one process.” If successful, adjustments in clients’ balances could feasibly be sent from XPlan to IOS and through to the brokerage house, meaning Bowral ACM planners could use XPlan to directly transport shares from one sub-fund to another. Each request “would go through IOS and wouldn’t touch the hand of a broker, but go directly to a broker’s trading system,” Hungerford said. However such requests “would still go to the brokerage house and a broker would still manage the system,” he said.