O’Shaughnessy Custom Indexing Platform Tops $1B
Firm's CEO sees further growth ahead, as “investors will no longer want to settle for investing fully in someone else’s formula. Investors will want their own.”
O’Shaughnessy Asset Management said Tuesday that its Canvas custom indexing platform surpassed $1 billion in assets under management in its first full year.
Advisors now manage over 580 client accounts on Canvas. More than 70% of accounts are customized by advisors to serve clients’ individual preferences, and roughly 16% of those accounts have an ESG component, according to the company.
Canvas “reduces the operational and system overload for RIAs, which leads to greater scale for firms and their advisors,” explained CEO Patrick O’Shaughnessy, in a statement. “Considering the clear benefits, we believe that by 2025 a majority of all advisors in the U.S. will use web-based software to create and manage Custom Indexes for clients.”
The web-based Canvas platform was launched in late 2019. The quantitative asset management firm said it worked closely with nine RIA clients to “develop and hone” the platform.
Canvas provides “several investment dimensions with which advisors can create and manage portfolios,” the company noted. These include asset allocation; weight into factors based on individual objectives; direct indexing; environmental, social, and governance; tax loss harvesting; position level customization; and fixed income.
Other functions available to RIAs using the platform include: Portfolio Builder, for advisors to build models; Tax Transitions, so they can “easily run a transition analysis based on current holdings and see the expected tax cost/benefit, subsequent deviation from the model, and applicable metrics for various transition timelines”; and Performance, which lets advisors evaluate all accounts in one centralized location, it said.
The company recently built an ESG strategy for an advisor that was “tailored to suit the needs of independent, working women,” O’Shaughnessy noted, predicting: “With time, we expect to only see more of this, as investors will no longer want to settle for investing fully in someone else’s formula. Investors will want their own.”