In the wealth management industry, business success is often achieved through carefully executed marketing and customer service programs. At the heart of every success, however, is the sales plan. The viability of the sales plan, in turn, is often influenced by the relative desirability of product offerings. In fact, more often than not, stellar sales results are preceded by desirable product offerings.

Arque & Co. strives to help its clients design and offer a customized set of desirable product offerings that can help drive sales and add immediate revenue and bottom line net profits while providing investors a professional portfolio management service.

What is a “desirable” product?

There is no such thing as a standalone desirable investment product. However, desirable products do exist…in the eyes of the beholder. Because investors’ needs and expectations vary, the definition of a desirable product is often open to interpretation.

Arque & Co. believes that a “desirable” product or more importantly “desirable” product selection is achievable…but it is a moving target. A product selection becomes “desirable” to a specific bank, brokerage, financial planning or wealth management firm’s clients if and only when that selection is customized to fit a specific organization’s target clients’ needs in terms of acceptable performance expectations and acceptable relative risk, i.e. portfolio volatility.

For this reason, Arque & Co.’s ArqueXchange™ wealth management platform offers a wide diversification of wealth management products from which clients may choose and customize their own unique product selection. In addition, the ArqueXchange™ wealth management platform is fully scalable which means that it can even accommodate products that were not selected by Arque & Co.

Notwithstanding, there are some general rules for identifying good investments. For instance, Arque & Co. believes that many superior money management/alternative investment products are limited by capacity constraints. In the long-only management world, this statement applies to small cap managers, small-to-mid cap managers and certain specialty managers (and typically not for large cap or core managers). As a result, Arque & Co.’s manager selection process includes a proprietary money manager business cycle analysis process which we believe is integral to identifying and capturing an investment managers’ best “lifetime” performance. Many good managers, of course, often close a product to new investors when the products reach their capacity constraints.

Arque & Co. constantly monitors its databases to seek both established and especially emerging “superior” managers. Unlike wirehouses that cater to service the needs of their tens of thousands of financial advisors by offering larger commodity-like money manager products, Arque & Co. will purposely select mid-size and emerging manager products which are not (yet) limited by capacity constraint and which have demonstrated superior risk weighted performances over various time spans.

Arque & Co. has already applied this selection philosophy when it constructed and managed Wedbush Morgan Securities’ wealth management product platform, which has resulted in very high financial advisor satisfaction and end-client retention over the last three years.

Notwithstanding, to best strike a balance between operating efficiency and the need to provide for customization, Arque & Co. will initially build a long-only platform which features both “established” and emerging money managers simultaneously on the same platform. It will also build two alternative investment platforms: one for more established alternative investment managers and one for emerging alternative investment managers.