After nearly two years of pandemic life, in which the ways advisors and their clients work, live and interact with each other and technology has drastically changed, a common theme has emerged among wealth tech leaders: the technology user’s experience is improving.
It’s not just that the end-client experience of working with wealth management firms through their digital channels has become better. But advisor- and staff-facing software is becoming easier to use.
“Instead of 2022 being about new features, functions and services, I think it’s going to be about the experience for the advisor and the end client, and their ability to engage in our systems in more meaningful ways,” says Sabrina Bailey, global head of wealth management at international wealth technology and research provider Refinitiv. “From a technology perspective, user design and experience will hands down be the things that wealth and technology companies focus on in 2022 from both an advisor perspective and an end-client perspective.”
Many advisors and wealth managers, along with their technology partners, have worked continuously on upgrading their client experience, especially after Covid-19 sent many people into a long-term work-from-home environment and made it difficult to travel or schedule face-to-face client meetings.
Adrian Johnstone, president of Practifi, an Australian and U.S.-based CRM and business management platform, says more functional client portals will arrive in 2022, empowering independent investor decision-making and enabling more co-planning between advisor and client.
“The client portal should free up the advisor from entering more mundane, transactional information and eliminate manual data entry currently incurred by firms,” Johnstone says. “It will allow clients to put the advisor in their pocket, and advisors to get onto the client desktop. It’s part of creating a more application-based experience that permits advisors to capture and view more data, allowing them to tune their value proposition and be a little bit more just-in-time with their advice.”
This year, additional focus will also be placed on improving the back-office experience, says David Knoch, CEO of Docupace.
“For at least a decade, we’ve been making some cool advisor-client-based technology, and what they have now is monumentally different from what was available 10 years ago,” Knoch says. “With it came a business shift to advisory, to planning, to practice management methodologies and to technologies that supported great financial planning. What happens next is a shift from experience to execution.”
A great financial planning experience is diminished by poor execution and implementation, he says. If something goes wrong in opening accounts or executing trades, clients will be more hesitant to engage in the next phase of their financial planning process. Addressing those processes requires an increased focus on the middle or back office.
Improving the user experience across the wealth management landscape requires better links between different, often disparate, pieces of software, says Marc Butler, CEO of Skience.
Butler has written about what he calls “the experience layer”—the technological connective tissue that bridges different pieces of software to create a coherent platform within and between firms.
“Firms have struggled with this for years,” he says. “On one end we see firms that have invested a lot of money to build their own solutions that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. On the other end, we see the platforms offered by clearing firms and custodians that rarely include everything an advisor needs or wants to do business.
“The experience layer comes in the middle and connects the advisor to the clearing firms, the custodians, the data, the reporting software, the CRM, the financial planning software and creates a common experience for the user in whatever they do. That’s the key to making things easier for advisors and users of all stripes. But we’re not doing a great job, and we’re still not there yet.”