The Sycamore Company: Driving Compliance, Advisor and Practice Management Efficiencies for Broker Dealers

BDs and Registered Investment Advisors often lack data transparency and accessibility within their firms to meet various operations and compliance needs. Attracting and retaining the top advisors is crucial, as is compensating them accurately and in a timely fashion. To meet these constant demands, Sycamore brings together data aggregation and data rich functionality onto one platform. We help firms manage advisors, compliance, and compensation—from processing commissions to performing compliance checks—while solving the omnipresent challenge of data silos.

Sycamore delivers all the data and functionality independent broker/ dealers, advisory firms, and hybrid firms need to recruit, manage, and pay advisors, meet compliance and audit requirements, and keep advisors connected—all within the Salesforce ecosystem.

The end-to-end, cloud-based, native Salesforce solution collects data from the right sources and normalizes it in a single database, making it accessible to multiple applications while ensuring the highest level of security. It is a FINRA Reg BI compliant platform and supports firms’ remote workforces indefinitely without having to change how they process or approve submissions and other workflows.

Sycamore solves the operational and compliance challenges of home offices out-of-the-box, providing simple and straightforward installation, configuration, and use within the native-Salesforce ecosystem.

Please elaborate on a case study where Sycamore enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes.

We helped Prospera Financial Services, an independent broker-dealer, to roll out its advisor platform, COREngine, on the Salesforce App Cloud. We provided Prospera’s advisors with a single technology platform to access Prospera’s proprietary tools, third-party vendors, and data from multiple custodians.

Prospera partnered with us, and we developed a Salesforce-based, integrated front- and back-office platform for broker-dealers and RIAs. We have worked together to develop a program tailored to fit the needs of both advisors and Prospera’s back-office staff to process business more efficiently and consistently with an eye toward the future.

Phase one of COREngine featured a suite of tools to help automate the direct business process of advisors and staff alike. The platform included a Customer Relationship Management tool, allowing advisors to easily manage and track client interactions, online document storage, and data aggregation that will allow advisors visibility of their entire book of business across custodians. COREngine also provided real-time reports and analytics, auto form filling through LaserApp, and customized workflow processes, giving the opportunity to track business every step of the way.

What, according to you, are the distinct features of Sycamore that give it a competitive edge?

Sycamore’s advisor portal is built using Salesforce’s Lighting and includes analytics which gives us a competitive edge.

Further, what steers us ahead is our team members’ industry knowledge; our subject matter experts include former Directors of Operations, Compliance, Recruiting, and Data Management, just to name a few. Team members include certified Salesforce System Admins; other team members take Trailhead courses to continue to build their knowledge and skills.