Innovest Systems
Robust Solutions for Effective Asset Management

For years, the technology used by banks, trust companies, and other financial institutions has lagged far behind other industries. Green screens, mainframes, and systems built in the 1980s remain surprisingly common. Founded in 2000, Innovrest’s mission is to bing secure, modern technology to market that helps financial institutions acquire new customers, invest assets effectively, efficiently manage portfolios, and flexibly report results. “With ever-changing regulatory and compliance demands as well as the increasing need to tightly manage security concerns, reliable, integrated, and modern technology has become a must-have for successful financial firms,” says William Thomas, chief executive officer of Innovest.

Innovest is a privately held firm that provides technology-driven services to global custodians, investment advisors, and retirement professionals through a SaaS model. Innovest has converted clients off virtually every legacy trust platform—Charlotte, AddVantage, Global Plus, FIS Metavante, SEI—and most of the smaller providers, as well. When implementing new solutions, Innovest converts history from legacy systems and makes it "live and searchable" allowing clients to embrace their future without losing their past.

Offering high levels of comprehensive security is a prerequisite for any financial institution. Although large-scale attacks against major financial institutions generate most headlines, community and regional banks, credit unions, money transmitters, and third-party service providers such as credit card and payment processors are potentially just as vulnerable. “Financial leaders must look outside of their brick-and-mortar facilities and consider the security of every remote endpoint to provide a comprehensive digital security overhaul. They should also closely evaluate their digital safeguards to prevent further attacks,” says Thomas. One of the ways Innovest maintains security on its technology platforms is through “ethical hacking” whereby trusted resources use the same methodologies a hacker would use to attempt to gain unauthorized access to the platform. Based on these tests, Innovest can proactively make changes before a breach has occurred.

Innovest’s flagship product, InnoTrust is a real-time trust accounting, portfolio management, and reporting system that allows the user to view an account's or group of accounts' asset allocation. Innovest also offers clients InnoPay for retirement payments processing, Innovest CRM for customer relationship management and workflow, and has a wholly-owned broker-dealer for trade execution services among other offerings.

One of Innovest's newest clients, Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, chose InnoTrust as its corporate and institutional trust platform and InnoPay for payments processing. The solution was used to streamline the client’s disbursement operations and for upgrading its trust technology platform and service delivery, better positioning the firm to grow its corporate and institutional trust business. Innovest helped Amalgamated address their client needs and improve their operational workflows. In addition, as a firm specializing in serving unions, employee benefit plans, and the municipal corporate trust community, Amalgamated found a provider with a deep appreciation for the importance of efficient disbursements processing.

For the road ahead, Innovest is moving forward and implementing the best end-to-end solutions for their clients

For the road ahead, Innovest is moving forward and implementing the best end-to-end solutions for their clients. “We are evolving continuously according to changes in market demand,making sure that the technology we are providing is secure, modern, and feature-rich. We continue to focus on ensuring that our technology is backed by a customer-oriented staff and management team and providing our clients with a technology solution that gives them a competitive advantage and helps them to service their customers,” concludes Thomas.