In both the development and presentation of plans, these technologies take the financial professional away from the rote tasks of planning and presenting and onto client-facing, revenue-producing activities.
Steps Six and Seven: Integrated, Autonomous Technology For Planning-Led Wealth Management
In the implementation and monitoring of financial plans, financial professionals once again believe the impact of big data and AI is here or just around the corner:
• Step 6: Implementing the financial planning recommendation(s)—56%
• Step 7: Monitoring progress and updating—66%
The integration and automation of all wealth management activities, centered around the client's financial plan, will be essential in implementing and monitoring plans. The future planning technology ecosystem will be a single experience—the efficiency and insight gained from this level of integration will yield a far higher number of much deeper relationships for planners.
In the future, all portfolio management decisions will be specific to the client's objectives outlined in their holistic plan, if they're not already today. Planning platform intelligence will then drive the automatic segregation of assets into goal-specific account groups, including tax-efficient routing of trades into relevant accounts, and the visualization of goal-specific plans within a broader financial plan.
Similarly, for large firms that produce their own thought leadership, intelligent platforms can automatically inject that thought leadership directly into planning processes to guide financial professionals in real time. For example, a financial professional could be shown market research when a certain security has been downgraded to “sell" status when a client's portfolio has this exposure. This effectively ties together the planning, portfolio management, and market research functions in an autonomous way, allowing firms to ensure decisions are made within the context of client's objectives in a way that's highly automated and scalable, but deeply personal.
The stitching together of all wealth management activities into a single experience, and the automation of certain wealth management processes, drastically enhances efficiencies for financial professionals and offers greater insight into clients' financial behavior. This opens the door for planners to engage directly with this behavior, improving the likelihood that plans are followed and successful. It also significantly lowers the resources required to output a comprehensive financial plan, not only allowing financial professionals to serve more clients, but to profitably serve a more diverse client base, especially those that don't traditionally fit into the AUM model of financial planning.
The Road To The Future Of Financial Planning
Big data and AI technologies have made quite a buzz over the years, but our research shows that financial professionals believe the time is now for these technologies to start making an impact in a major way.
Planning platforms are learning more about client behavior, small forms of automation and intelligence are already weaving themselves into many aspects of the planning process, and new integrations between systems are being worked on every day.
Technology helps clients learn more about themselves, their relationship with money, their goals, and helps educate them about future possibilities for a more fulfilling life. Technology helps planners find ways to better educate and serve clients, deepening the client relationship more than ever before without losing productivity.
The planning process itself is not going to change—but entirely new levels of efficiency, personalization and scale are just on the horizon. Technology will push the relationship between planner and client to become more holistic in nature, while planning services will become more accessible to a broader audience.
Josh Belfiore is senior product manager at eMoney Advisor.