Lyft filed for its IPO at the beginning of March and Uber is expected to file in April, making it one of the most anticipated offerings so far in 2019. The success of these ride-sharing services is a direct result of their ability to identify and meet consumers’ need for more reliable, affordable access to rides. They effectively use mobile technology to match people who want rides with people who want to drive, creating more value for the end user by cutting costs, complexity and bureaucracy, delivering an efficient, high-value service that out-competes traditional incumbents and continues to disrupt an entire industry.
Technology is already transforming every aspect of your clients’ financial lives as well, from banking and investing, to mobile payments and lending. Now the “uberization” of financial advice is on the rise. RIAs and fee-based advisors are adopting more technology to adapt to clients’ expectations for service that is transparent, instantaneous and delivered the way they want, while still meeting clients’ needs for holistic and comprehensive planning to help them achieve their financial goals. This is driving demand for an integrated and seamless process at every stage of the financial lifecycle, from accumulation, to retirement income, to legacy planning, while also managing risk, managing taxes and other critical specialties that go far beyond the basics of stock picking and portfolio management.
The importance of these intersecting trends is crystal clear: Year-over-year, investors say holistic financial planning is among the top three factors for choosing their advisor, according to our annual Advisor Authority study of more than 1,700 RIAs, fee-based advisors and individual investors. And year-over-year the most successful RIAs and fee-based advisors—those who earn more and manage more AUM—are far more likely to use more technology to provide holistic planning for clients and invest more in technology to give their practice a competitive edge.
Find A Platform that Fits The Way You Work
In a world where Netflix and Amazon have raised the bar for convenience, choice and greater value, the advice industry must deliver solutions that today’s tech-savvy advisors demand—and their tech-savvy clients have come to expect. Just as Uber and Lyft connect drivers and passengers through innovative platforms that seamlessly fit into their lives, there is an opportunity for our industry to develop technology and platforms designed to fit the way you work to creatively satisfy your clients’ complex needs.
A prime example is the integration of insurance into holistic financial planning. Too often, insurance solutions for tax-deferred accumulation, guaranteed retirement income and downside protection must be treated as “held away assets.” But today’s investors, a full decade after the 2008 financial crisis, continue to worry about the market. Many studies show that more clients are demanding downside protection and guaranteed income solutions to address their concerns about saving enough for retirement and outliving their savings.
Not only does our industry need to offer you the right products, our industry needs to provide you with the right platforms and the right integration capabilities—from tools and analytics, to management and reporting capabilities—to effectively serve your clients and ensure better outcomes. One recent example is our collaboration with the Envestnet Insurance Exchange (iX), a new network launching this summer that will integrate insurance solutions from six major carriers into the wealth management process on the Envestnet platform. Joining this exchange is our latest step in a 10-year track record of serving RIAs and fee-based advisors the way they want to be served—using the platforms and technology they want to use—to manage insurance holistically alongside the other assets in their clients’ portfolios.
Our approach began by doing the research and having the industry experience to understand the priority RIAs and fee-based advisors place on tech integration. To provide more holistic planning—and to increase productivity—RIAs and fee-based advisors need a single view of all accounts and a seamless process for managing all types of assets side-by side. To meet their demands, and to truly fit the way they work, we’ve invested more than a decade refining our own proprietary technology platform to provide an end-to-end advisor experience, from an all-electronic process for issuing policies, to online portfolio management and trading capabilities, to self-service policy administration.
We’ve made it a priority for our platform to provide integration capabilities into advisors’ existing workstations and into other leading platforms used by more than 95 percent of RIAs and fee-based advisors—including custodians and clearing partners, portfolio management systems, and platforms for trading, rebalancing and account aggregation. We’ve also taken the extra step of “building the pipes” for direct data feeds with other comprehensive platforms such as Orion, Pershing Advisor Solutions, E*TRADE Advisor Services and Envestnet; services such as By-All-Accounts, eMoney and Ndex; as well as data transmission conduits such as BAA, DST, DTCC.
Harness The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence
Beyond advances in platform integration, the use of advanced analytics and smart technology like artificial intelligence (AI) plays an equally important role in the “uberization” of financial advice. As artificial intelligence continues to dominate the headlines and disrupt the status quo, Advisor Authority revealed that two-thirds of RIAs and fee-based advisors say that AI will give their firm a competitive advantage.