\Recognizing the need to utilize more methods of communications with clients, a Cleveland-based registered investment advisor has signed a deal to utilize a communication platform developed by another RIA firm using it with its own clients.
Communicating with clients is an essential part of an RIA’s business. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more companies and individuals turned to video conferencing to stay in touch and keep working. After the pandemic, many did not wish to return to the hassle of in-person meetings and saw the convenience of remote communications.
Mike Shebak, head of Institutional Consulting and senior managing director at Cleveland-based Clearstead Advisors, said his firm realized the need to improve its online communications during the pandemic.
“My team and myself went from years and years and years of getting in the car to drive to have to see clients in person … now all of a sudden we were Velcroed to our seats at home,” he said.
Prior to the pandemic his advisors met with clients in-person four times a year. Now they still meet four time a year, but two of those meetings are virtual. The firm has gotten by with video conferencing software, however it needed a more long-term solution.
Last month, Clearstead signed a deal with Madison-Wis.-based eCIO, which is another RIA that created its own proprietary virtual communications platform, called eVestech.
The firm, which launched in 2019, created eVestech, to act as a proprietary communications hub for clients to communicate with their advisors and preserve important documents. Its RIA business consists of institutional nonprofit investors with investable assets of $1 million to $10 million.
Rob Roquitte, CEO and founder of eCIO, said his firm originally intended eVestech to be used by its own RIAs for quarterly investment committee meetings, performance reports, as well as performance and investment program progress, and storing essential fiduciary documents and records.
However, the onset of the pandemic pushed the platform to grow and expand and become a software as a service (SaaS) venture for the firm.
“[The pandemic] really accelerated in two years what probably would have taken a decade or longer to happen as far as digital adoption and the desire for clients to want to interact on a virtual basis,” he said.