Orion adds BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard models to its tax engine

Orion has added BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and Vanguard models to Tailored Allocation Portfolios, the custom-indexing wrapper it launched in fall 2025, WealthManagement.com reports. The program runs each manager's ETF and mutual fund models through Orion's technology, providing tax management and personalization at scale on top of a third-party investment philosophy, and advisors can use it to migrate concentrated positions, legacy holdings and tax-sensitive accounts into models gradually, rather than all at once.

According to a new Fuse Research Network report, advisors rank tax-loss harvesting as the portfolio customization capability clients most want, and tax optimization tends to matter most to advisors serving clients with $500 million or more in assets. Orion's own Advisor Wealthtech Survey, published in February, found that more than half of its 571 respondents planned to adopt or expand tax optimization services over the next five years. The surveys describe a feature advisors will move assets for, and Orion has built exactly that: a tax engine that can be bolted onto models from almost anyone.

The three managers are expanding their model menus at the same time: Vanguard launched its first custom models last month for multi-asset and single-asset strategies, Fidelity introduced turnkey private-markets models in March, and BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard have all expanded their line-ups in recent months, as the coverage notes. Ron Pruitt, Orion Wealth Management's president, framed the move as flexibility without losing discipline: advisors start from a manager they already trust, then adapt to each client's goals and tax situation. The models are available across Orion's platforms and fully integrated with Orion Custom Indexing, turning Tailored Allocation Portfolios into an open-architecture wrapper with Orion's tax technology underneath and giving Orion a stable of managers to pitch in the same breath.

Vanguard, which has been courting RIAs, is willing to hand its models to Orion's engine, and that is the more consequential part of the announcement. The value in model portfolios is shifting from the model itself to the layer that makes it tax-efficient for each household; tax-loss harvesting looks like a checkbox and behaves like an operations problem, which is why the fund shops would rather rent a tax engine than build one. For Orion, the models are raw material and the custom-indexing engine is the product. Vanguard's RIA courtship, as this publication has reported, makes the timing sensible, but the next test is whether custodians try to build the same tax layer into their own model marketplaces and whether Orion's head start holds.