Alphathena vs. Parametric
Tired of legacy systems that can’t keep up with your needs?
Alphathena stands out by streamlining operational complexity, enhancing scalability, and delivering a modern, user-friendly experience with unmatched portfolio personalization.
What Sets Us Apart?
Parametric operates as an outsourced provider for direct indexing, but Alphathena empowers advisors to take complete control of their portfolios.
While Parametric relies on quarterly rebalancing, Alphathena offers a dynamic, real-time solution. Our platform is designed to continuously monitor market conditions and rebalance when necessary, allowing advisors to seize more opportunities and manage risk more efficiently.
What Our Clients Say
10 reasons why Alphathena is the best Parametric alternative for financial advisors
1.Tech-only vs Sub-advisor
Alphathena is a software service and we focus all our energy on building and perfecting our platform. Parametric provides software in addition to sub-advisor services and primarily pushes the latter. We believe Parametric pricing is 20bps + additional fee for DI + ETF/other assets.
2.Degree of Customization
Alphathena offers 40+ index customizations including ESG across 1200+ ETFs/Indexes, while competitor’s customizations are limited to 2-3 key areas, mostly ESG-focused. This is critical to serve a diverse set of clients' needs and manage existing clients' assets.
3.Sleeves and Household Support
Alphathena has built-in household support with virtual sleeves allowing advisors to create and designate securities across sleeves and then focus on specific sleeves for investing, rebalancing, transitioning or harvesting. Greatly improves workflow and decreases the overhead of needing to open new accounts and move cash around.
4.Multi-Scenario Transitions
Alphathena's Transition module is the most sophisticated out there, allowing advisors to analyze entire portfolios and accounts, model multiple scenarios, and run hyper-parallel optimizations across each scenario with detailed reporting. Parametric's transitions are generally limited to individual securities with restrictions on broader portfolio adjustments.
5.Security and Account-level Harvesting
Alphathena's platform offers the capability to perform tax-loss harvesting across households, identifying replacements at both the security and account/portfolio level - features we believe are beyond Parametric's current capabilities.
6.White-labeling
Alphathena is the only platform that can white-label and fully customize its web platform to align with any client's brand, delivering a seamless and integrated user experience. This includes personalized branding, custom theming, and tailored workflows to ensure consistency with the client’s existing services and a cohesive presentation to end users.
7.API Scalability
Alphathena is an API-first platform, allowing us to integrate with multiple inbound and outbound systems seamlessly. For large institutions, this is critical as it allows Alphathena's services to be embedded directly into their applications. While Parametric offers robust capabilities, publicly-available API functionality does not appear to be part of their offering based on available information.
8.Parallel and Batch Processing
Alphathena can rebalance and tax loss harvest multiple accounts in parallel, in real-time as well as offline. Based on our understanding, this functionality is not available with Parametric.
9.Advanced Optimization
Alphathena has developed a very sophisticated optimization engine that allows advisors to optimize index weights and allocations at scale, against multiple benchmarks and targets.
10.Integrated AI
Alphathena has deep AI integration enabling huge workflow and usability efficiencies. To the best of our knowledge, Parametric has no AI integration.
What Our Clients Say
The complete direct indexing solution you’ve been looking for
Alphathena offers unparalleled flexibility and control over portfolio management.
Model Portfolio Flexibility
Advisors can upload and blend their own model portfolios within Alphathena, allowing for greater customization and rebalancing towards those specific models. This enables tailored portfolio management and enhances personalization for clients.
Seamless Legacy Portfolio Management
Unlike other platforms that may require liquidating existing mutual funds, Alphathena allows you to seamlessly integrate mutual funds into the transition process. You can also assess risk and tax impacts in different scenarios before making decisions, offering you and your clients a more transparent and informed investment strategy forecasted over 1-3 years.
Custodian-Agnostic Integration
No matter which custodian you work with, Alphathena ensures that your assets stay under your control, providing the flexibility to fit your needs without being tied to specific providers.
Advanced Optimization Tools
Our platform balances personalization with benchmark performance, allowing you to optimize portfolios in alignment with your clients’ financial goals.
Realtime Tax Loss Harvesting
The market is episodic, and tax-loss harvesting should be as well. Unlike many platforms that stick to rigid monthly or quarterly schedules, Alphathena allows you to rebalance and harvest losses as market conditions change. Advisors also have the flexibility to follow a scheduled approach if they prefer. When the market shifts, Alphathena ensures you're capturing opportunities in real-time—without being restricted by predetermined timelines. Additionally, Alphathena takes wash sales into account, helping you avoid complications that could negate the benefits of tax-loss harvesting. This provides a more flexible and responsive strategy to optimize tax efficiency while minimizing risk.
End-to-End Lifecycle Management
Alphathena covers every stage of the portfolio management process—from design and investment to transition, harvesting, rebalancing, and ongoing management.
Recognitions & Achievements
🏆 Winner: 2023 Morningstar Fintech Showcase
“Alphathena, with its elegant platform and powerful engine, is an example of a growing field of innovators that have learned to harness frontier technologies to deliver better outcomes for investors.”
Lawrence Johnson
Head of Emerging Fintech at Morningstar
WealthMgmt Finalist for Artificial Intelligence and Direct Indexing - 2023, 2024
“Wealthies” is the only awards program of its kind to celebrate the companies, individuals and organizations who are bringing new innovations to market that make a real difference to the daily activities of financial advisors.
ThinkAdvisor Luminaries Finalist in the Financial Planning Firm Award - Innovation category!
The ThinkAdvisor Luminaries Awards honors outstanding individuals and firms in the financial services industry. Recognizing excellence beyond traditional metrics, such as asset growth or product enhancements, the Awards focus on exemplary leadership, groundbreaking innovation, and outstanding community impact by both firms and individuals.
Switch to the #1 alternative to Parametric.
We recently helped transition a $10M portfolio with $2M in embedded gains, keeping realized gains under the client’s annual $100K threshold while maintaining market exposure.
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