Castleview’s investment and operational platforms are built by and for independent advisors. The objective at all times is to make it possible for our firm and our advisors to serve clients better and more efficiently. This in turn allows our advisor partners to grow and strengthen their practices, and to make their advisory businesses more profitable. In building our firm to serve independent advisors and their clients, we believe we’ve structured ourselves to avoid the many common pitfalls and bad practices we’ve encountered over the years in various segments of the financial advisory industry. At the same time, we’ve worked very hard to integrate as many best practices of our industry as possible into our business model.

Partnering with Castleview will immediately give you operational scale, yielding increased negotiating power with custodians and other third party technical support providers, as well as access to investment managers and strategies that would otherwise not be available. This drives costs down for both clients and advisors, improving margins for advisors.

A partnership with Castleview results in favorable economics for you and your practice. Put simply, Castleview does not have the same high-cost infrastructure to support as do the large brokerage firms and the independent broker-dealers. With much lower overhead and no legacy technology to support, we are able to charge you less for the use of our operating and investment platforms, so a higher percentage of the fees you’re paid by your clients drops to your bottom line.

Castleview and its executives have strong and growing relationships with multiple major custodians, including most importantly Schwab, TD and RBC. This allows accommodation of clients who have existing links to these custodians and who may not wish to switch and accommodation of a variety of “non-standard” products and vehicles. Competition among these custodians results in better pricing for Castleview, advisors and clients.

One of Castleview’s core strengths is the breadth and depth of its technology and operations experience in the independent advisory world. This real world, in-the-trenches experience, acquired in both corporate and independent firm settings, is embodied in the background of Doug Gill, the firm’s lead founder. Doug previously started and ran (from 2001 to 2014) a turnkey asset management platform (TAMP) that provided the investment strategy and technical back office support for $2 billion in client assets gathered by multiple independent advisory firms.
 We’ve used this in-depth knowledge and understanding of the operational aspects of the financial advisory business to select, assemble and successfully integrate an outstanding suite of third-party providers to serve the technology, analysis, reporting and other support needs of our clients and our advisor partners. We would be happy to share our thinking with you on these best-of-breed providers, with which we’re intimately familiar. They include Orion, Riskalyze, eMoney and the custodians noted previously.

A second core strength of our firm is our deep and broad knowledge of investment markets and our extensive experience in building optimal client portfolios, a product of more than a century of portfolio management experience that our key executives have together accumulated. This intimate understanding of investment markets, strategies and portfolio construction, coupled with our open architecture approach to investment management, allows us to readily and successfully put together suitable portfolios for clients that have attractive risk/return characteristics.

Our firm and our key executives have a great deal of experience managing the compliance aspects of the financial advisory business and we efficiently focus the necessary technological and staff resources on compliance matters as they affect all of our advisors. This takes a huge compliance burden off of our advisors, making more of their time available to spend working directly with their clients.

Having organized our firm as an independent, fee-based RIA, we have chosen to hold ourselves to the highest fiduciary standards and, by registering with the SEC, to subject ourselves to oversight by the most professional, knowledgeable regulatory entity in our industry.
 Because we are an independent RIA and have bolstered adherence to high industry standards with our own internal compliance practices, we have fewer potential conflicts of interest to contend with and our advisors have more flexibility in using, creating and implementing investment and other planning strategies that best serve clients. Our firm’s Investment Committee is made up of highly experienced professionals whose due diligence process ensures that any funds or strategies approved for use in client portfolios are suitable, in clients’ best interests and of course compliant with both SEC regulations and fiduciary standards of our industry.

A third core strength of Castleview is it’s deep experience with and understanding of the financial planning process. All of our advisors are CFP® professionals and/or have extensive planning experience and knowledge of the key financial planning disciplines, to include investing as well as tax and estate planning, banking/credit, insurance, general cash flow analysis and benefits/retirement planning.
 To ensure that we are optimizing and fully integrating all recommendations we make to our clients across the financial planning spectrum, and that they have full and ready access to all important planning documents and reports, we have invested heavily in adding eMoney, the industry’s leading financial planning software package, to our firm’s technology toolkit. Our firm has been working with and through eMoney since its founding. We have found eMoney to be such a valuable tool that we have hired a CFP® professional to focus on leveraging its value to better serve our clients.

Communicating with our clients in a concise and user-friendly way is a priority for Castleview, especially when it comes to reporting on the risks and returns of client investment portfolios. To do this, we use two state-of-the-art software applications or systems, Riskalyze for measuring and reporting on risk and Orion for all other reporting. Orion offers our advisors the ability to produce consolidated statements and reports for clients (versus multiple statements from multiple custodians), branded to the advisor’s firm, if desired, via private labeling. As a firm, we have intimate knowledge of both Riskalyze and Orion, and know how to leverage these systems in attracting, serving and retaining clients.

We have processes, manuals and checklists in place for facilitating the on-boarding of new advisors to the firm - all of which are designed to generally ease their transition and entry to the firm and, in particular, give them a jumpstart in becoming familiar with our back office/ technology and investment platforms. All key staff at Castleview have experience in helping advisors in this process and take pride in making the transition as smooth as possible for their new colleagues.

We work hard to build and nurture a collegial firm culture that emphasizes teamwork, mutual support and respect. Throughout the hiring process of our staff and third-party support providers, and in all of our discussions with potential new advisors, we screen not just for competence and technical expertise, but for “user-friendliness.” We want everyone working at and with our firm to be comfortable collaborating and sharing information, ideas and best practices so that we can all provide better service and more value to our clients - and thus help grow our individual practices and Castleview as a whole.
 One of our objectives in creating Castleview was to provide a collaborative community for successful advisors, in which they could share, discuss and compare investment strategies, technical financial planning ideas and best client service practices. We think we’re well on our way to creating such a community. It’s also worth mentioning that we believe in the value of staffing diversity and have so far assembled a team of advisors and other professionals whose backgrounds (professional, technical, personal and even political) are, by design, varied. We think this helps us avoid “groupthink” and encourages open dialogue and innovative thinking in analyzing investment markets and opportunities, in problem-solving and in serving our clients.