Differentiators

Our firm is unlike any other in the financial services arena. We take pride in doing things differently. Here we highlight the areas that we believe set us apart from our competition, differentiators that bring value to your specific needs.

FEE-ONLY FIDUCIARY

eBIS is a fee-only Registered Investment Adviser, meaning we accept compensation from clients and no one else.  We don’t accept commissions, finder’s fees, revenue sharing, wrap fees, referral fees, or any other form of compensation from a third party.  This arrangement elminates conflicts of interest, provides transparency, and puts clients’ interests first.

In addition, we as a firm are bound by the fiduciary standard of care, requiring that we act in clients’ best interests.  Fiduciary is the highest standard of care in the industry of financial advice, contrasting with the Suitability standard required of brokerage representatives.  For more information, see our news release about the fiduciary standard that we as a firm adhere to:  eBIS Fiduciary Standard.

We believe everyone seeking financial advice and investment management services deserves fee-only and the fiduciary standard, and they are important differentiators for our firm.  We recommend investors require these two attributes of their financial advisers.

VALUES

Our values guide our business practices. Every day, with each engagement, we strive to serve our clients in a manner informed by our values.

  • Dedication : It’s the fabric of our firm. We dedicate ourselves to our clients’ success. Whether it means researching a topic thoroughly before a meeting, preparing a critical presentation, making tough architectural decisions, or introducing clients to others who might have faced similar challenges, we take whatever steps are necessary to serve our clients. We care, and it shows in practice. We also demonstrate our dedication to your initiative through our corporate pledge, guaranteeing your satisfaction.
  • Innovation: Ideas drive us.  We value thinkers, those who evaluate an opportunity from many angles, iterating through alternatives until the best one becomes apparent.  Is the conventional solution the best one?  Many times convention is born out of convenience or stale information.  We firmly believe that innovative thinking leads to improved outcomes and business value.
  • Integrity: Honesty is our best policy.  We mean what we say and do what we say.  If changes occur, as they inevitably do, we inform our clients and make decisions with facts and circumstances clearly in view.  We openly disclose our business practices and answer questions directly.
  • Fairness: Our goal is to treat everyone with fairness and respect.  As a policy, we do not discriminate against anyone based on ethnicity, gender, color, or creed.  We are proponents of merit, and welcome the opportunity to offer ours and learn from others.
  • Collaboration: Is collaboration a value?  For us, it is.  No one person or firm has all of the answers.  We’ve found that environments that effectively facilitate collaborative exchanges foster better results than those that do not.  We create a fun, inclusive environment that values open communication and teamwork.  We commit ourselves to collaborating with our clients and partners to generate outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

THE EBIS PLEDGE

eBIS is dedicated to the success of our clients. We pledge to deliver the solution you need. If, at any point, you are not completely satisfied, we will remediate until you are satisfied, free of charge.

FOCUS

Financial Services consulting is what we do, and it’s all that we do. We solve problems for individuals or entities in the business of making investment decisions and managing financial risk. These perspectives drive our strategic thinking. With each engagement, we invest significant energy getting to know your business or situation as if it were our own, and then apply reason and thoughtful consideration to the issues at hand. We use our focus to your advantage by leveraging lessons learned with other clients in similar situations. Our business philosophy: never make the same mistake twice…make the same success repeatedly.

We offer three primary services: 1) investment portfolio construction, financial planning and fiduciary counsel, 2) portfolio risk management and performance measurement, and 3) regulatory policy & compliance. We offer significant experience and innovative ideas in these realms, with numerous success stories. From implementation of investment portfolios along an efficient frontier to navigation of the latest regulatory reform to analysis of economic value, our focus can help you.

EXPERIENCE

Our focus breeds experience.  We are professionals steeped in the complexities of investment portfolio modeling, risk management, and regulatory compliance across the financial spectrum.  We’ve designed implemented investment solutions for retirement plan sponsors and individuals.  We’ve helped retail thrifts and mortgage lenders.  We’ve developed analytical solutions for diversified commercial banks.  We’ve advised asset managers.  We’ve designed solutions for trading desks.  We bear the scars of our failures and medals of our success, gained through experience since 2002 as a going concern, and careers dedicated to serving this industry.  Our experience can bring valuable guidance to your next fiduciary, compliance, or risk initiative.

INDEPENDENCE

We pride ourselves on providing an independent view, unbeholden to a specific strategy or ideology.  On every initiative, we analyze problems from multiple perspectives and question conventional wisdom.  We often suggest approaches that can enhance or improve existing ways of thinking, adding strategic value.  We feel a plan is only as good as the solution it provides, and we are quick to act when we feel a new direction or revised approach can help our clients.

We provide thoughtful and deliberate advice in the retail space and comprehensive solution delivery services to institutions, through our Professional Services and Solution Toolkit.   On large projects, we excel at partnering with large firms (see our niche) to enhance overall solution quality.  We firmly believe that complex requirements don’t necessarily translate to complex solutions.  Multiple perspectives, approaches and opinions can improve the cost:utility ratio.  eBIS thrives in this equation.

We know our clients have a choice every time they partner with someone.  We think our independence adds a valuable component for our clients: thought leadership to generate new ideas and deliver innovative solutions.

NETWORK

Through our experience, we’ve built a substantial network of independent and small firm consulting professionals with extensive experience in financial services consulting.  We work with and know some of the most talented people in our industry niche.  We deliver these professionals in the roles required to address your needs.  In every initiative, our resources leverage our consulting process to generate ideas and deliver the right solutions. For a detailed explanation of the knowledge capital we bring to bear, please read about our partnerships.

PROCESS

“The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.”

– Socrates

The Socratic dialogue is a search for truth by questioning, probing, defining terms, and clarifying meanings of important, complex topics. At eBIS, we embrace this technique; we love to ask questions, and we listen to what people say. We use questions to invoke thought and corral collective wisdom. And perhaps most importantly, we use questions to understand what we don’t know. It drives us to generate ideas and find answers. We feel a heuristic process produces the highest quality solutions for our clients.

Our approach to solution delivery centers on proven best practices, innovative problem solving, and, where a complex methodology or technology is necessary, re-usable solution toolkits. All are outgrowths of our process of using questions to build knowledge and drive comprehension.

Socrates knew a thing or two.

SERVICES AND TOOLKIT

We believe that we offer the most comprehensive set of services of any small financial services advisory firm.  Our services cover investment advice, compliance, and business strategy and all aspects of the solution delivery lifecycle.  See our Professional Services for details.  These are not just canned offerings, but rather formulated from our own experience, bespoke to what we think can best serve our clientele.

For solution delivery, we offer a complete toolkit to help our clients implement a solution effectively, focusing on lowering the long-term cost of ownership.  Too often we’ve seen our clients fail to recognize key components of solution engineering and ownership, causing chronic staff shortages, misperceptions, and budget shortfalls.  These observations have driven us to compile this toolkit, which acts as a vehicle for effective planning, management, delivery, and ownership of complex portfolio modeling, retirement planning, analytic and reporting solutions.

Our professional services and tools: differentiators that can not only successfully deliver a solution for you, but enable you to successfully own it.

TECHNOLOGY

Our greatest advantage in technology is that we don’t have one.  We approach every initiative with a technology-agnostic view.  We think of technology as an enabler, not a driver.  Fully understanding your business need is our top priority.  When needed, we can recommend a technology that best suits you, considering your current IT infrastructure, project scale, and potential for change.  We neither sell software, nor have incentives to pitch certain technologies.  We are solution providers, analyzing your requirements and marrying the appropriate technologies to them.

Maybe your business needs a software vendor’s enterprise package, customized to your specifications.  Perhaps you need a best of breed amalgam across the software stack in an n-tier web deployment.  Your business might benefit from a service oriented architecture, minimizing IT infrastructure and instead subscribing to applications in the cloud.  Maybe business buy-in is lacking and a desktop prototype would illuminate the value of a reporting approach.  Whatever your need, eBIS will partner with you to devise the right technology strategy.

We’ve learned that the right solution flows from this basic tenet: no technology is right for your business unless it adapts to your needs.