Providers
Model delivery sends the target and leaves you the implementation. Full outsourcing hands over both. The strategies can be identical; the accountability is not.
Model delivery sends you the target — the holdings and weights — and your firm implements it. You place the trades, handle the exceptions, reconcile the results, and remain operationally responsible for everything that happens after the model arrives.
Full outsourcing hands over the implementation as well. The provider trades, rebalances, handles the exceptions, and reports.
The strategies can be identical. What differs is who does the work and who is accountable when it goes wrong.
Model delivery looks cheaper because the visible fee is lower. The work does not disappear; it moves onto your staff, where it is paid for in salary rather than in an invoice and is therefore harder to see.
Firms comparing the two frequently compare a fee to a fee, when the honest comparison is a fee to a fee plus the fraction of a person it takes to implement across every account, every month, correctly.
A firm with real operational capability, deliberately built and adequately staffed, that wants strategy input while keeping implementation control. That is a legitimate model and some firms run it well.
It fits badly when the operational capability is one person who also does three other jobs.
Not which is cheaper. Ask: when a rebalance goes wrong across your book, who fixes it, how quickly, and who is answerable to the client?
Under model delivery, all three answers are you. That may be exactly what you want. It should be a decision rather than a discovery.
Some firms run both: full outsourcing for the core, model delivery for the mandates where they want to keep their hands on the wheel. Sensible, and worth doing explicitly rather than drifting into.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Schedule a call to see for yourself