3 essential technologies to have in your toolkit

The role of financial advisors is evolving in today’s digital environment. Consumers are now experience-seekers who strive to educate themselves and expect on-demand access to information and expertise. At the same time, the demographics of a financial advisor’s client base are changing, with more women expected to capture a significant amount of the great wealth transfer in the coming years and Cerulli reporting a whopping $72.6 trillion is predicted to pass down to Generation Z and millennial heirs.

Clearing the bar created by these changes will require advisors to modernize alongside their clients in an effort to remain pertinent. This is a process that’s enabled by the integration of digital technologies that parallel the kinds of capabilities today’s consumers are accustomed to seeing in other industries and service lines. Advisors don’t have to be early adopters and avid fans of technology, but they do need to embrace the ongoing digital transformation and consider ways that tech can be used to upgrade their practice. 

Advisors must focus on three essential technologies to be successful in the modern market.

1. Client relationship management solutions

CRM solutions designed specifically for financial advisors can improve prospecting, customer onboarding, client support and communication — resulting in increased efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Intelligent forms, auto-completion capabilities and electronic signatures all are features of today’s CRMs that help speed up the data collection process. The integration of these “expected” features helps align wealth management processes for customers with the client experiences they are used to outside of the financial services industry.

CRMs also enhance advisor-client communication. Integrated data and email functionality make it easy to exchange and confirm information. Built-in forms and templates enable advisors to easily build and execute targeted marketing campaigns. Filters and segmentation tools mean advisors can focus on subsets of their clients who share very specific needs. And activity management features ensure that no steps, tasks or meetings get overlooked. Everything happens when the client expects it, every time. All client calls, meeting notes and documentation can be connected to the client record and “frozen” when a task is completed, creating automatic and bulletproof audit trails for compliance purposes.

2. Modern financial planning solutions

There was a time when financial planning was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, unstructured and based on ad hoc interactions. But that approach is too variable, unreliable and incomplete to meet client needs today. Today’s investors expect a streamlined discovery process that is participative, easy and fast. They want discovery to be underscored by planning solutions that are designed to uncover a client’s entire set of personal circumstances, objectives and constraints methodically, strategically and repeatably. The best digital solutions enable advisors to more easily comply with increasingly stringent client-focused regulatory reform, creating better solutions for consumers.

Many digital planning solutions are now integrated with made-to-order CRMs, and with these, advisors can easily access a client’s current situation and future financial requirements. There’s no need for advisors or clients to reenter data, and the streamlined discovery process makes it easy to uncover a full range of investment needs.

This type of holistic and compliance-oriented financial planning software enables advisors to easily build comprehensive financial portraits of a client’s current situation and use integrated guidance to create credible, needs-based plans for their future. Clients can be confident that the solutions they are presented with are the ideal match to their range of future needs. 

3. Portfolio design and analytics software

Comprehensive portfolio design and analytics tools enable advisors to easily create professional and persuasive investment proposals, investment policy statements and portfolio analysis reports. These tools have the capacity to perform institutional-
grade investment and portfolio analytics on those recommendations, helping advisors streamline the due diligence process for their investment solutions. Design and analytics software is a big leap forward for advisors, as these tools enable advisors to up their analysis game and provide even higher-quality advice to their clients in a time-efficient manner.

In some cases, portfolio design and analytics software will also include a built-in investment product comparison functionality. With this automated feature, advisors can easily fulfill the requirement that they show their clients investment products that are similar to the ones they’re recommending. And instead of that time being spent clicking back and forth between investment products, advisors can refocus it toward building and improving client relationships. 

By providing a more omnichannel experience for clients and streamlining service processes, this software helps bring the financial advising experience in line with modern client expectations.

Successful advisors understand the importance of modern technology and take steps toward organizational tool adoption. 

Technological change and demographic shifts have started an evolution when it comes to the role of advisors. As a result, wealth management professionals must not wait to embrace the new tools that are surfacing but should take steps to implement them in their practice.

The advisors who achieve the greatest success today aren’t content to play a product fulfillment role. Instead, they act as partners in their clients’ lives. They focus not just on their clients’ financial future but also on the larger client journey and their clients’ overall goals — the security of their family and enjoyment of life. Understanding where and how to leverage technology and tools to achieve this objective is an essential part of the evolution of the role of a financial advisor. 

Jonathan Georges is vice president, wealth industry principal, Equisoft. Contact him at [email protected].