Bravera Wealth serves clients throughout North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota. With deep roots in trust management and fiduciary oversight, the firm has steadily expanded its mineral management capabilities under the leadership of Russell Murphy, a senior wealth advisor specializing in mineral and estate assets.
Bravera’s Growing Mineral Management Needs
As client portfolios became increasingly complex, including hundreds of mineral tracts and oil and gas wells, Bravera sought a software partner that could keep pace. In 2023, the firm implemented SS&C MineralWare, a platform purpose-built for managing mineral and royalty interests with the capabilities that fiduciary institutions require.
Bravera’s mineral management operations outgrew the extent of spreadsheets and entry-level dashboards. With over 700 wells and more than 580 tracts, manual oversight became a bottleneck when responding to trust beneficiaries, preparing reports for non-profits, or conducting internal audits.
Murphy tried other platforms but found them lacking. “Most of what’s out there wasn’t built for fiduciaries,” he explained. “You could see some data on a dashboard, but couldn’t tie income to specific tracts or verify payments efficiently. That’s a liability when you’re responsible for someone else’s wealth.”
Modernizing with MineralWare
Bravera adopted MineralWare to modernize and scale its mineral and estate asset management. The implementation replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, outdated software, and manual processes with a single source of truth for mineral accounting and activity monitoring.
The platform quickly became a daily tool for the wealth team, empowering them to manage assets proactively and with far greater confidence. Since implementing MineralWare, Bravera Wealth has realized meaningful benefits across operations, compliance, and client service.
MineralWare enables Bravera to move beyond surface-level dashboards and deliver comprehensive, auditable data that withstands internal and external scrutiny. Trust beneficiaries, auditors, and nonprofit recipients now receive transparent, well-documented reporting, instilling a sense of reassurance and trust in their fiduciary. Alerts for dockage hearings, missing payments, and lease expirations enable Bravera’s team to proactively address issues, thereby reducing the need for time-consuming “spot audits” and allowing staff to focus on strategy and client relationships.
Scaling Expertise and Innovation
As Bravera’s mineral portfolio has grown in volume and complexity, MineralWare has scaled in lockstep, allowing the firm to take on more clients without compromising service standards. Outside CPAs and tax professionals receive controlled access to the platform to view payment data and track quarterly distributions, which creates fewer surprises at tax time and improves the overall client experience.
MineralWare continues to work closely with Bravera on enhancements, including satellite imagery, new data streams, and deeper integration with energy data providers, reflecting a shared commitment to innovation in mineral management. The result has been a transformation in how Bravera manages mineral assets. “With MineralWare, we’ve moved from spreadsheets and educated guesses to a platform that gives us total command over what we manage and the data to back it up,” Murphy said.
As mineral management becomes increasingly important in trust and estate planning and as competitors lose ground due to the retirements of experienced staff, Murphy sees a long-term opportunity. “There’s a real gap in the industry when it comes to expertise and tools. MineralWare helps us fill that gap and grow in a space that others are pulling back from.”
SS&C MineralWare offers innovative management tools for individuals, family offices, institutions, and banks throughout the oil and gas sector, specifically the mineral and royalty space. To learn more about how SS&C MineralWare can support your unique business needs, call (817) 735-8195 or email contact@mineralware.com.
