At Ingalls & Snyder, advisors work directly with clients to construct highly bespoke portfolios, each aligned with their evolving financial goals. While that hands-on model helped the firm build longstanding relationships across generations of families and institutions, it also placed significant responsibility on its lean advisory teams to ensure scalable and strategic portfolio management.
As the firm’s client base expanded into the thousands, Chief Executive Officer Robert Case realized that visibility into portfolio management and risk alignment was slowly slipping. At the time, advisors would manually track portfolios and create proposals through disparate spreadsheets and custodial systems. This approach not only created information silos across the firm but also resulted in extended proposal creation times that slowed conversations with existing and prospective clients.
From a risk alignment perspective, the challenge was equally apparent. James Thatcher, Managing Director, works closely with clients while helping lead the firm’s advisory team. While identifying obvious red flags (such as concentrated positions) even across scattered systems was relatively straightforward for James’ team, surfacing subtle portfolio deviations tied to life circumstances was a looming challenge.
“As clients retire or begin paying education expenses, that causes an adjustment to long-term financial priorities,” James shares. “But detecting those shifts across thousands of portfolios often requires manually reviewing accounts and identifying exceptions one by one.” Without a centralized operating system for surfacing those deviations, maintaining a uniform view of portfolio risk across the firm became increasingly difficult.
As Robert and James explored ways to solidify visibility across the firm, they began speaking with investors they had known and respected earlier in their careers. Through those conversations, they were introduced to StratiFi.
After seeing how StratiFi approached portfolio management and risk alignment, Robert and James quickly recognized that it offered something fundamentally different: an operating system built for the fragmented reality of modern wealth management. Following a quick demo, they had all the conviction they needed to solidify the partnership.
“One of the realizations that struck me was that as we’re managing more client accounts, it’s possible that we don’t necessarily have a uniform top-down view of how those portfolios are being managed and whether they’re aligned with the client’s risk tolerance.”
— Robert Case, CEO at Ingalls & Snyder
Ingalls & Snyder chose StratiFi as its unified financial operating system for risk oversight and proposal analysis across existing and prospective clients.
Implementation was quick and collaborative. James’ team worked closely with StratiFi to connect thousands of client portfolios and import each account’s holdings, positions, and transaction history in only a few days. Once that data was connected, StratiFi immediately began calculating portfolio-level risk measurements and surfaced them in a centralized dashboard that remains viewable across the entire firm.
Instead of manually reviewing portfolios across disparate systems to assess risk alignment, advisors now use StratiFi to run firmwide reviews that automatically identify accounts whose risk profiles fall outside the expected range. StratiFi highlights those portfolios directly within the dashboard, allowing the advisory team to focus immediately on the accounts that require attention.
Robert and James also worked alongside the StratiFi team to strategize on how to label risk exceptions for more efficient remediation. Together, they found that most exceptions could be traced back to a small number of recurring scenarios.
For example, some portfolios appeared more conservative than expected because clients needed additional liquidity for upcoming expenses such as retirement or tuition payments. Others appeared more aggressive because clients held concentrated stock positions with significant unrealized gains that would create tax consequences if sold.
Working together, the teams developed four standardized labels to categorize all risk exceptions. When StratiFi identifies a portfolio outside its expected risk range, the advisory team can now quickly determine whether the variance reflects a deliberate client decision or a portfolio that needs adjustment.
The partnership’s impact also extends to proposal creation. With StratiFi, advisors can upload a client’s statement directly into StratiFi and generate side-by-side comparisons between the client’s current portfolio and an alternative portfolio designed by Ingalls & Snyder. Advisors can then review differences in risk, diversification, and return potential in minutes, helping them generate proposals faster while solidifying client confidence in tandem.
“StratiFi is excellent at taking a client’s existing account statements, digesting the information, and showing where there may be opportunities to earn higher returns or improve how the portfolio is structured.”
— Robert Case, CEO at Ingalls & Snyder
With StratiFi, Robert and James gained firmwide visibility across thousands of accounts, slashed proposal creation from days to hours, and built a regulator-defensible system that automatically solidifies risk alignment.
Looking ahead, Robert and James are eager to expand their StratiFi usage by implementing OperationsIQ; creating unified, clean client data sets across all CRMs and portfolio systems.
“StratiFi turns workflows that used to take days into something advisors can do instantly. We’re confident their operating system will continue evolving in ways that support how we manage client portfolios.”
— James Thatcher, Managing Director at Ingalls & Snyder
Robert Case and James Thatcher were not financially compensated for participating in this case study. All views and opinions expressed are their own.