Custodian Interfaces

Captools/net Professional and Enterprise level products support your import of "institutional" type data provided many custodians, clearing firms and third party data intermediaries.  Institutional data is typically provided in a single bulk download covering all of the accounts managed by an investment advisory firm or broker/dealer.  These downloads are typically not available to individual investors, but may be accessible by family offices and other institutions where significant assets are managed.  Custodian import interface functionality is described in the Captools/net documentation at the topic Interface Operation.  Custodian imports can be manually triggered by the user, or can be scheduled to import automatically.  Captools/net provides a Reconciliation table which simplifies the process of verifying that Captools/net data matches your custodian's data.  The frequency of imports and reconciliations is under the user's control, however most users import either daily or weekly, and reconcile at least monthly.  

Captools/net availability of custodian/clearing firm interfaces varies, depending upon license level, with the most widely available and/or less complex interfaces available at the lower license levels. Unlike some other competing software providers, Captools Co. does not charge a per interface fee, nor is Captools Co. controlled by or allied with a particular custodian.  This gives you more flexibility in controlling where you direct your clients' business and in accepting business from higher asset clients who may prefer alternative custodians or multiple custodians in order to achieve the safety of custodial diversification. (Be aware that some other software providers or service bureaus may be preferentially biased toward certain custodians due to marketing agreements or ownership interests by a custodian and therefore may not offer this flexibility).

The Captools/net custodian/clearing firm interface has been designed to give us flexibility in importing data from many different data formats, including the data formats specified by competing portfolio management software products.  If your custodian or clearing firm is not mentioned below but utilizes the services of, or is affiliated with, one of the listed firms, we may still be able to support you.  The Data Intermediaries listed also support data from a large number of mutual funds, annuity providers, custodians and B/D.s.  Please visit their websites to see their most recent listings.   If your custodial data provider is not listed below, we may still be able to develop an import interface for your data, provided that you can make arrangements with your custodian to obtain your data and to provide a representative sample of that data to our development staff.  In either case please contact our sales department at 800-826-8082 (or email sales@captools.com) to explain your situation.  Finally, if your data is in some unique format, such as when exported from another application, Captools/net gives you the facility to build your own import interface as described in the topic Generic Imports.

Captools/net and your data privacy - Unlike some portfolio software solutions, Captools Company is NOT a data intermediary. You control the download of your data from your custodian, clearing firm or other data provider direct to your computer. Once the custodian data is on your computer it can be imported into your Captools/net data base on your computer at a time of your choosing through either a manually triggered import or automatically at a scheduled time.   In contrast to the Captools approach, many other portfolio software solutions and service providers gain access to your data increasing your risk of loss of data privacy.

Please also see the Notes section below for more detail concerning availability, operability and other conditions concerning these interfaces.

If you do not see an interface above for your clearing firm or custodian, please call or email us as we may be able to easily support it if the data you can received from them is in a format that we already support or is easily scripted. 

Also, if you do not see your custodian or B/D, but you know they clear through a third party clearing firm, you may be able to access that data via the clearing firm with your B/D's permission. 

Generic Template Based Imports - Captools/net also can import data via user customizable import templates that can handle most comma or character-delimited text data.

Additional functional detail is available in Captools/net "Help documentation".

Notes:

1) Prospective users of Captools/net should check with their custodian and/or clearing firm for whether the relevant institutional level data will be made available to them.  Many custodians will have minimum asset under management requirements and/or a monthly download fee.  Additionally, prospective users operating under the supervision of a broker/dealer will typically need to obtain their broker/dealer's permission to gain access to institutional data through a download from a clearing firm.

2) Some of the interfaces listed above may include a download component, however many will require the user to download data files using either software or download protocol provided by the data provider.  Once the data files reside upon the Captools/net server, they will be importable into the Captools/net database.

3) While in many cases our import interfaces are developed with the cooperation of the firm providing the data, in some cases this is not possible due either to their attempt to  to maintain a "closed" system, limited to only in-house or selected software providers, or due to their requiring unfavorable contractual arrangements in return for cooperation.  In these cases we often can still develop and maintain an import interface, subject to the cooperation of the data user.  This will usually involve your providing a representative sample of your data that you receive from your custodian to permit us to analyze the data format and implement an import template.

4) If your prospective data provider is not on one of the above lists, but you know that if provides data in a format importable by another portfolio management software product, please contact us.  In many cases we have developed interfaces supporting such data formats and thus may be able to easily "clone" an existing interface to support your data requirements.

5) Users should understand that data imported into Captools/net from third party sources is subject to error.  This may be the result of faulty data translation in by the Captools/net import template and/or due to post processing errors.  It can also be the result of changes made by the data provider in data format or data codes.  Such errors are usually easily detected by the user at the time that they perform a post import reconciliation, assisted by Captools/net's reconciliation utility.  Fortunately such errors generally occur at a relatively low frequency for interfaces for which we have long experience, but may be more prevalent for interfaces that are new or have low usage.  In the latter case we will endeavor to work with you to obtain reduced error rates as quickly as we are able.

6) Historical Data - Users should understand that if they have accumulated substantial amounts of data (many months or years) from a custodian, that they will be guided by Captools Co. in getting initialized and importing and reconciling recent data only (up to about 4 months).  This is for a number of reasons.  First, most custodians only provide up to about 3 months prior data; in our experience the inability to get earlier missing data makes working with earlier data difficult and problematical since most users who were not regularly importing their custodian data inevitably were not diligent in getting all custodian downloads.  Second, the user's knowledge about and memory of transactions occurring some time in the past makes it difficult to resolve reconciliation issues.  Lastly, some users defer getting portfolio software to save on their expense, expecting to compress several years of data entry and reconciliation into a few intense weeks of time while they are still learning the software, naturally culminated by an important reporting deadline.  Our desire to not support the latter situation should be self-evident.  After users have become initialized with recent data and have become fully familiar with the operation of the Captools/net software, they can later "backfill" older data through imports and manual entry to build history, provided that there is the understanding that this is a strictly user's own time/effort operation.