Adhesion Wealth® won two awards at the eighth annual WealthManagement.com Industry Awards on Sept. 8, taking home honours for excellence in Model Marketplaces in the Technology Providers category, and as RIA Innovator of the Year in the Individual RIA Firm Leaders category for President Barrett Ayers. This is the fourth consecutive year Adhesion has won a "Wealthie" for its model marketplace.

"Being recognized in this way, both personally and as a company, is such an honour and is truly a testament to the incredible team we have here at Adhesion Wealth," Ayers said. "I'm proud to work alongside a group of professionals who are eager to solve problems for advisors, always innovating and improving the services we provide. Through Adhesion's customized investment solutions and outsourced managed account capabilities, we are offering RIAs creative, cost-efficient resources that help them to meet clients' unique investment goals. As outsourcing becomes more prevalent, Adhesion is at the forefront of equipping firms with portfolio construction tools that free up advisors' time to spend with clients and grow assets."

The Adhesion Wealth Manager Exchange is the industry's second-largest model marketplace. The marketplace connects investment advisors to a suite of over 4,000 models from nearly 500 institutional asset managers. Over the past two years, the Adhesion Wealth Manager Exchange launched several new initiatives that have provided advisors with greater access to rapid-level distribution, offering full technical infrastructure with trading, models, reporting and portals.  

Under Barrett's leadership over the last year, Adhesion launched various initiatives: Tax Alpha reporting, which shows investors the value of an advisor's decision to enable active tax management; first to marketability for a fixed income and options overlay within a UMA; Personal Indexes with ESG Overlay, which allows advisors to develop their own Direct Index models that can be run inside a UMA; and lastly, a TAMP solution where managers have a turnkey investment program to distribute their TAMP and models on Adhesion's Managed Account Platform.

For eight years, the WealthManagement.com Industry Awards have honoured the firms and individuals who are bringing new innovations to market that make a real difference to the daily activities of financial advisors. This year, 105 awards were given out to 84 recipients from a pool of 225 finalists. Nearly 1,000 entries were received from more than 350 companies.

The winners of the WealthManagement.com Industry Awards were selected from a panel of independent judges made up of top names in the industry and led by WealthManagement.com editor-in-chief David Armstrong. In the Technology Providers category, Model Marketplaces subcategory, Adhesion was selected out of three finalists. In the Individual RIA Firm Leaders category, Innovator of the Year subcategory, Barrett Ayers was selected out of five finalists.