At the 2025 Charles Schwab IMPACT Conference in Denver, one conversation stood out for its clarity on where personalized investing is headed. Manju Boraiah, Global Head of Systematic Fixed Income and Custom SMA at Allspring Global Investments, offered a compelling look into how the firm’s customized separately managed account (SMA) platform is changing the game for advisors and their clients.
Over the past year, Allspring’s platform has experienced extraordinary momentum, with gross sales up 82% and adoption by all major wirehouses. Beneath those numbers lies a broader trend reshaping portfolio management: the demand for scalable customization that merges tax efficiency, personalization, and performance outcomes.
“Tax efficiency is the main pillar,” said Boraiah. “Can you embed tax efficiency in the way portfolios are built through time? That’s really the key driver, in my view.”
The Convergence of Active, Passive, and Personalized Strategies
While many firms have focused mainly on direct indexing to meet customization demand, Allspring deliberately took a more expansive approach. “Our vision has always been to build a multi-asset SMA platform,” Boraiah explained. “Advisors and clients sometimes want passive strategies, sometimes active strategies—they want to have an ideal asset allocation mix. Our belief is that tax efficiency or customization should be available across the entire suite.”
By integrating active fixed income alongside passive equity—and enabling tax-managed overlays across both—advisors can serve a wider range of investor goals within one coordinated platform. This flexibility allows for customization around sector and industry exposures, ESG and values-based preferences, income targets, and risk tolerance, all while maintaining focus on after-tax outcomes.
Real-World Customization: What Advisors Are Doing Now
In practice, advisors are taking advantage of Allspring’s platform in diverse ways. Some use it to transition legacy or concentrated stock positions into diversified portfolios; others build bespoke allocations that reflect client values or yield preferences. Most are harnessing its ability to blend tax management with investment personalization in one place.
“It’s all of the above,” Boraiah said when asked how advisors are using the tool. “On the equity front, direct indexing allows exposure to core beta while adding a tax advantage. We’ve seen demand for sector and industry exclusions, legacy position transitions, and even faith-based customization—with options like Jewish, Catholic, Islamic, and Baptist screens.”
Dividend yield is another popular factor, he added, as advisors use it to enhance income while maintaining diversified exposure. “Dividend yield tilt enhances the income profile by about 80 basis points in certain regimes,” noted Boraiah.
On the fixed income side, customization focuses on duration, maturity, and credit quality—allowing advisors to position portfolios around client income targets and changing macroeconomic environments.
The Power of Systematic Fixed Income in Customization
Fixed income customization is central to Allspring’s platform, and its design rests on a systematic investment discipline. With millions of bonds outstanding and complex constraints around credit quality, duration, and tax treatment, systematic processes create the consistency needed for smaller, more efficient custom portfolios.
“Systematic gives you the underpinning of building customized, tax-managed portfolios,” said Boraiah. “If you really want to build a portfolio of 20 or 30 bonds in a disciplined way—with guardrails—you need a structured process. Our systematic approach, combined with fundamental research, helps avoid the left tail of credit risk that can hurt fixed income portfolios.”
This marriage of data-driven modeling and human research insight allows Allspring to design portfolios that are both customized and robust—helping advisors offer clients individualized solutions without sacrificing discipline or scalability.
Managed Accounts and the Evolution of the Advisor’s Role
The rapid adoption of Allspring’s customizable SMA platform across wirehouses also reflects a deeper change in how advisors manage time, client relationships, and practice scale. As portfolio management becomes more quantitative, automated, and tax-aware, advisors are increasingly outsourcing investment implementation so they can focus on client relationships and business growth.
“Advisors want to outsource more of their asset management to firms like ours,” Boraiah explained. “Their time is better spent on practice management, relationship building, and scaling their business. We can take over portfolio management and add a tax advantage on top, so they can showcase a complete advisory solution to clients.”
That shift—from investment selector to holistic advisor—is one of the most important trends reshaping wealth management. Allspring’s SMA platform acts as an extension of that evolution, providing institutional portfolio design within a customizable, advisor-friendly framework.
Technology as the Enabler of Scalable Personalization
To deliver personalization at scale, technology does the heavy lifting. Allspring’s proprietary technology platform, Remi, anchors its customizable SMA experience. Remi streamlines everything from account onboarding and servicing to tax-loss harvesting and portfolio management, giving advisors a single point of access for constructing multi-asset, tax-efficient portfolios.
“Technology helps us drive efficiency—not just operational efficiency, but efficiency in general,” Boraiah emphasized. “Price compression is real in our industry, across active and passive strategies. Technology allows us to automate and scale the way portfolios are built and managed.”
Automation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence all play roles in enabling the next generation of advisor-led customization, reducing administrative burden while expanding what’s possible for client portfolio personalization.
Why Advisors Should Care
For financial advisors, Allspring’s Custom SMA platform represents a confluence of the trends shaping the industry: personalization, tax optimization, automation, and scalability. The approach reinforces the advisor’s value not as a stock picker but as a strategic portfolio architect and client relationship leader.
By combining active and passive exposures inside a single customizable SMA, advisors can better align client goals with investment structure—and do so with institutional-grade tools that embed systematic risk management and tax-smart execution.
As Boraiah succinctly put it, “Tax efficiency should be evergreen—it should apply across the entire portfolio.”
The result is a model that helps advisors not just manage money, but manage meaning: portfolios that reflect what each client values most, backed by the scale and discipline that busy practices require.
Learn More
To explore how Allspring’s customizable SMA platform can power your advisory business and help deliver personalization at scale, visit AllspringGlobal.com.
Related: The Power of Visualization: How Voyant Is Redefining Wealth Conversations