Despite the finance industry investing billions of dollars in digital and technological upgrades to give wealth management advisors a leg up with their clients, adoption levels are low, leaving advisory firms unsure of what to do next, a recent survey by the Money Management Institute (MMI) and Aon found.

Around a third of advisors prefer to use third-party tools over the tools their firms provide, and less than half of clients said they were very satisfied with their advisor’s digital tools, the survey said.

“This must be frustrating for firms when they’ve invested so much money in building these tech platforms to make their advisors more efficient and more effective,” said Peter Keuls, Aon’s global head of wealth management. “Their advisors are still going out in large numbers to use third-party tools.”

One reason, Keuls said, is that most firms developed their technology incrementally, building on a base that might be two decades old and adding more functionality and capabilities over time.

“But what happens then is you have a system with a number of built-on pieces that don’t necessarily talk to each other,” he said. “The classic example is the CRM [customer relationship management] system that doesn’t communicate well with the financial planning system, so the advisor has to re-input the client information from the CRM system into the financial planning tool to produce a report.”

Frustration with those walls often compel advisors to look for a platform that’s better integrated, has better functionality or an ability to customize that the firm’s software doesn’t have, the survey found.

The solution, however, is not to throw more money at flashier features but to simplify the core features that advisors and clients want to use regularly.

“The firms are spending more than they can afford to spend, especially if you put a rate of return on their spending versus adoption,” said Craig Pfeiffer, president and CEO of MMI. “We talk about clients, we talk about advisors—I have to continue to remind people they’re citizens. And our citizens want easy things. Everybody in my neighborhood wants easier things, wants shorter content, wants more precise content, wants lazy use of graphics and numbers.”

Clients are used to being able to book airline tickets, manage their bank accounts, engage with brands, order a car service or groceries, conduct business and touch friends socially, all in a matter of seconds or minutes. “When they get over to financial services, it shouldn’t be so hard,” Pfeiffer said.

Advisors can improve how their digital offerings resonate with their clients by talking with them about their preferences and recording them in whatever CRM system the advisor uses, he said.

In addition, the survey suggested that advisors coach their clients on the tools that are available and demonstrate their use during a financial planning appointment to help improve adoption rates.

The tools clients liked and used the most were the simple, straight-forward ones that aided in the core facets of an advisory relationship, the study found, while fancier bells and whistles often were ignored. For example, 69% of clients used communication tools, such as video conferencing and messaging. Account aggregation (66%) and personal goal tracking (65%) were also popular.

When it came to retirement forecasting tools, clients preferred income forecasting (56%) to asset forecasting (49%), which reflects the priority investors place on understanding what their future income will be and the implications that has on their retirement years, the study said.

Not surprisingly, use of specific tools was strongly correlated to the life phase of the client, with budgeting tools being the most popular among 35- to 44-year-olds (76%) and retirement living expenses tools being the most popular with the 55- to 59-year-old set (68%), the study found.

Investment advisors would do well to forgo complexity and embrace simplicity if they’re hoping more clients will use the tools provided to them, as some 85% of clients said they preferred simpler tools that had more integrated features, but not additional features.

The study had the following recommendations for advisors looking to upgrade their digital offerings:

The last point, the advisors surveyed said, may be easier said than done. Only 39% of them said they found it very easy to personalize the content they pushed out to their clients, and even fewer found it easy to personalize the format of that delivery, and yet 70% of clients wanted that personalization.

The advantage in the tech-tool race goes to the larger firm with the scale and budgets to produce content in multiple formats and create systems that allow their clients to choose how they wish to receive information, the study said.

“The investment in technology is the fastest growing expense for wealth management firms. Growing at 10-20% per year across the industry. So very fast paced and they’re spending huge amounts,” Keuls said. “The challenge is for the medium-size and smaller firms, who don’t have the scale to make the investments that a Morgan Stanley can in these platforms. So you can say they’re spending more than they can afford, but it still may not be enough.”