Working With Our Firm
Thank you for taking the time to learn about Opima Capital Management.
Twenty-one years in financial services, eighteen of them advising clients, taught me that the standard I wanted to hold myself to was not one I could deliver from inside a large institution. So I built my own firm.
Most families I meet are already working with three or four capable institutions. A bank in one place. A brokerage in another. A private bank holding some of the assets and most of the debt. Each one is competent at what it does. Each one shows you its own slice of your wealth, sometimes with a view-only feed of the others, and sells you from its own menu. And each one assumes that if you want a different advisor, you will move everything in order to get one.
You should not have to, for reasons I hope to lay out below.
Keep the institutions that are working for you
Your advisor and your institution are two separate decisions. The industry rarely treats them that way.
If you like your advisor and not your bank, changing the bank should not cost you the advisor. If you like your bank and not your advisor, changing the advisor should not cost you the bank. We can work with many qualified custodians, which often reduces or eliminates the need to transfer assets at all.
Staying put also costs you nothing in service. You keep the accounts where they are, at a bank, brokerage or trust company, you grant us advisory access, the data feeds into our investing and reporting platform, and we have full management, trading and reporting there. The same management and the same reporting, whether or not the account ever moved.
Two things to know when you choose to hold assets where they sit. Best execution may not be possible at every custodian, and a custodian may charge a fee for its services. We will show you where that trade-off falls before you decide anything.
Where an institution is genuinely not serving you, I will say so. If you then decide to move, we run the transfer in kind, so nothing must be sold to make the move happen.
Open architecture
We do not manufacture investment products. There is nothing for us to place with you.
What we do instead is identify, invest in and oversee the securities, strategies and managers we believe are right for your situation, wherever they happen to live. One firm may run fixed income better than anyone else we can find. Another may have the alternatives platform worth using. A handful of individual managers may earn a place alongside them. All of it rolls up into one portfolio, governed by an investment policy written for you. We bring the same diligence and ongoing oversight to the private investments you already hold or are offered.
Set that against a captive menu, where the answer to every question you ask turns out to be whichever product that firm happens to sell.
One view of everything, and one person accountable for it
A bank relationship, a brokerage account and a private bank holding your loans means three logins and three partial pictures. No one sees the whole balance sheet. No one answers for it.
Our reporting platform, Addepar, brings every account across your bank, brokerage and other custodians, together with private holdings, real estate, and other assets into one reconciled view, updated daily, with a client portal and mobile access. Multi-custodian by design. Private and illiquid assets included. Not a view-only feed of accounts someone else is managing.
Some assets have no data feed at all: private holdings, most real estate, certain retirement and stock plans. Those are entered and valued in the platform and advised on, and we automate whatever can be automated.
The coordination across all of it is mine. One fee, on every asset we advise on, wherever it is held, on one schedule. Custodian, execution, fund and third-party manager fees are separate, and we receive no portion of them. Your assets always sit with a qualified custodian, never with Opima, and your custodian statements continue to come directly to you.
One more way to think about it
Consider a very good restaurant. The menu may be exceptional, and there may be things on it you will not find anywhere else. But it is their menu, their location, their hours, their kitchen and their pace, and for the evening you are captive to it.
What we do is closer to hiring a private chef. You choose the location, the kitchen and when the meal is served. The chef brings the staff and the food, not a menu to pick from.
You are not limited to one excellent kitchen. You can have several at once, with one person answerable for the whole meal.
One adviser. One fee. The whole balance sheet. Accountable for all of it.
Conversations are confidential, unhurried, and without obligation.
