In October, Blaze Portfolio entered into an agreement to be acquired by LPL Financial. We continue to function as a stand-alone company under the same name, providing the same services and solutions we’ve always offered: efficient portfolio rebalancing, streamlined trade order management, and tax-efficient investment strategies.
Our team members are staying in their current roles and will continue to carry forward the client-centric culture that has made us successful. This acquisition allows our employees to continue to evolve and grow our technology offerings.
Blaze Portfolio’s talents and capabilities, backed by LPL’s scale and resources, will enable us to expand on our core offerings and serve investment advisors in new and different ways in the future.
According to InvestmentNews, “with Blaze advisers have access to technology that enables them to do the same type of trading and asset management a professional portfolio manager would be able to do — enhancing the adviser’s value proposition in a time when “do it yourself” free trading has become increasingly popular among investors.”
As Barron’s noted, our trading system “has particular appeal for advisors who want to manage client portfolios themselves but rely on a models-based approach instead of constructing a bespoke portfolio for every client.”
Supporting advisors is the single most important factor behind this acquisition, which is why this is a great fit strategically and culturally. Having the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer in LPL as our owner gives us the resources to build a lot of technology we’ve dreamed about all along. With LPL, Blaze has the opportunity to scale, expand the capabilities of our product and partner with an experienced team to design technology around the advisor experience.
In order to achieve our goal of end-to-end trade management and processing, Blaze Portfolio integrates with multiple portfolio accounting and reporting systems, such as Black Diamond, Orion, and Morningstar, and custodians including Charles Schwab, Pershing and Fidelity.
As LPL Financial Chief Investment Officer Burt White stated, “Acquiring Blaze Portfolio will enable us to provide our advisors with a dynamic trading and rebalancing system that can be utilized by practices of all sizes, affiliations, and sophistications to meet their clients’ needs.”
LPL will be our largest client, but not our only client. We appreciate every one of the 135 investment firms who has joined since our founding in 2010, and we look forward to the future in helping integrating our technology with LPL Financial!