“Hey Claude! You are a financial advisor with a prospective client meeting tomorrow. Run a tax-aware transition across their household to our latest 80% equity/20% fixed income multi-asset strategy with a $20,000 capital gains budget. Do not sell their private asset holdings and acknowledge a 2% cash buffer. Output a white-label PDF that includes summary asset allocations, risk/return statistics, holdings and an assessment based on their stated goals.”
That would be … magical. And is possible via SS&C Rendezvous’ Proposal Generation services – not artificial intelligence (AI).
The acceleration of AI and the scaling of publicly available Large Language Models (LLMs) is ineffable. The surface area of its potential applications across industries proliferates like a dream with each new release. Unfortunately, so does the delusion of the “end of software”. Hopefully the end of poor software and suboptimal applications – but certainly not Quality ones.
“… there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all.”1
“Quality is not objective … It doesn’t reside in the material world … Quality is not subjective … It doesn’t reside merely in the mind … but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other”.2
“The world is uglier than it needs to be … beauty is not a rivalrous good.” – Patrick Collison3
Based on countless discussions with advisors (not via prompts), there is a glaring pain point: generating proposals for prospects and clients with an awareness of tax consequences. This is also a high-frequency, high intensity problem that requires iteration – some discretionary interplay with a technical process. It demands Quality.
We decided to leverage our (mechanical) expertise to build proposal generation solutions – with a strong focus on this sense of Quality.
“The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along … The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.4
“There's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it.” – Steve Jobs5
There is more than one right way to build and repair a motorcycle (software) – and that’s the art, the romantic beauty of decisions, intuition and spirit. Assembling Proposal Generation solutions is a creative process grounded in objective needs of users:
- Tax Optimization: The introduction of tax lots and certain constraints creates hard, non-convex problems to solve. We developed a state-of-the-art engine to handle balancing tracking error to a target model and taxes quickly, at scale. The need for speed is a requirement to generate multiple plans and iterate with changes in constraints, models, or client preferences.
- Decision Justifications: While the logic may seem like magic, the reasoning is not. There cannot be hallucinations of a black box when dealing with clients and their money. There is tractability and detailed reasoning for each trade.
- Risk Modeling and Capital Market Assumptions (CMAs): Investment expertise is part of our identity. We have developed custom risk models and CMAs as maps to help guide others. These help refine the optimizations while allowing clients to better understand the implications of changes being made.
- Goals-Based: Each client is unique. Their investments are Values (not just values), mediums of achieving meaningful goals – getting themselves, or their family, to destinations. This is the “real business of motorcycle maintenance.” Our Proposal Generation services include analyzing the effectiveness of portfolios across a client’s prioritized goal set, estimating probability of achieving goals and suggesting repairs needed to better achieve them.
- Use of AI: All of this to say we do leverage AI where appropriate. It is an enhancer – not a destroyer – of Quality. From machine learning in our quantitative research, to automatically ingesting client PDF statements as inputs, AI helps cover our blind spots.
“They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, ‘I am a mechanic’ … They were involved in it but not in such a way to care.”6
We are mechanics. And there is no manual or AI for building a proposal generation solution. A mechanic must care – and identify with it – to do Quality work.
We care.
Proposal Generation is currently available on the Black Diamond Wealth Platform. To learn more about the technology or how to use, read more about it or contact your Black Diamond representative. Tax optimization as part of the Proposal Generation Pro package coming soon.
To sample running tax-aware proposals, live demos or other questions, contact the SS&C Rendezvous team by emailing us rendezvous@sscinc.com or visiting our website.
Important Disclosures & Definitions
Large Language Models (LLMs): computational models capable of language generation or other natural language processing tasks. As language models, LLMs acquire these abilities by learning statistical relationships from vast amounts of text during a self-supervised and semi-supervised training process.
1 Pirsig, R. M. (2014). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Vintage. Pg. 28.
2 Pirsig, R. M. (2014). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Vintage. Pg. 240-242.
3 Startup Archive. (2024). “Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products” [Video]. YouTube.
4 Pirsig, R. M. (2014). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Vintage. Pg. 166.
5 Startup Archive. (2024). “Steve Jobs explains the difference between a great idea and a great product” [Video]. YouTube.
6 Pirsig, R. M. (2014). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Vintage. Pg. 27.
© 2024 SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. Rendezvous is a product of SS&C Technologies. The Black Diamond Wealth Platform is a product of SS&C Advent.
AAI000747 09/03/2025
