Building the experience layer can mean the difference between a stagnant firm or a growing firm, a contented staff or a truly satisfied staff, and indifferent clients or engaged ones, Butler says. Small firms using software like Salesforce as the underpinning of an experience layer may end up “punching above their weight” because they’ve executed well on their technology strategy.
“The truth is that there are plenty of advisors who are happy serving the constituency they have today and aren’t looking to grow or open up more accounts,” Butler adds. “The experience layer helps these financial advisors do their business easier and more effectively and ultimately serve their clients better—it’s not just for the growth-oriented advisors out there.”
Every stakeholder interacts with Butler’s experience layer—the end client, for example, wants one centralized place to view their accounts, look at their financial plan, review documents and analyze their performance.
Wealth management firms will also be faced with the rise of “platform-as-a-service” technology models, where they are offered a modular most-in-one technology platform rather than an all-in-one platform, and they are empowered to build their own applications on the cloud in a simple, code-free environment, says Brian McLaughlin of Redtail Technology, a CRM provider.
“I think we’re going to start seeing platforms as a service start to come out for enterprise organizations, giving them different offerings than we’re used to seeing in fintech,” McLaughlin says. “We’ve already seen some embedding of various solutions together and we’ll see more of that, like the automatic embedding of the opportunity for life insurance for an advisor within a CRM. Also, the norm is now hybrid. Your clients are everywhere, your staff might be everywhere too, and the wealth management firm is now digitally enabled.”
McLaughlin believes there is a lot of potential for disruption in the compliance and regulation technology spaces as well, and that there’s an opportunity for artificial intelligence to take over a lot of the intricate, time-consuming compliance tasks wealth managers face.
But the end investor’s experience is evolving, too.
“When we talk to advisors, the first question we get from them is: ‘What is the end experience going to look like?’” says Christopher Sallemi, chief technology officer at STP Investment Services, a financial services and technology provider for wealth management firms’ front-, middle- and back-office operations. “They want to make sure their platform has a very reactive feel to it, because investors want to see the growth of their dollar over time and want to participate in the planning. If you’re not digitizing the whole client interaction, you’re probably behind at this point.”
Sallemi believes that through continued consolidation and demand for ease of use, the boundaries between wealth management services providers and wealth tech firms will begin to blur.
So 2022 might end up as the year of the user experience. There is one wealth tech leader, however, who is skeptical.
“The user experience cat is out of the bag and it’s becoming table stakes,” says Colin Falls, president of GeoWealth, a turnkey asset manager. “Firms have been coming out with new user interfaces, new user experiences, more intuitive workflows over the past five or six years, and it’s starting to get hard to differentiate which part of an advisor’s technology stack actually helps them grow faster.”
He believes technology that allows for more detailed and intricate portfolio customization, like custom indexing, will emerge as the major technology trend for advisors over the next 12 months.
“It’s hard to know what’s important in technology right now,” says Falls. “There’s a lot of noise, even in the media, and with few conferences it’s become difficult to keep up to speed about what actually will add value to your practice. I think the best thing a firm can do is to bring in outside talent to disrupt their own opinions about how to operate their businesses.”