To meet evolving client demands and acquire new assets in a competitive industry, many advisors are diversifying their offerings and providing clients with more service options. According to a study from Schwab, in 2014, just 67% of RIAs with more than $250 million in AUM offered charitable planning services. By 2018, that number was up to 79%. Similarly, while 68% of those RIAs offered tax planning and strategy in 2014, 74% provided this service four years later. The expansion in services illustrates the extra effort taken by advisors to deepen their relationships with clients.

Offering more options and more diverse services requires advisors to use more data, a challenge when many work from multiple apps, platforms and programs that lack centralized integration. With new applications added to address new service offerings all the time, advisors may struggle to efficiently access and utilize the data they need to take the next step toward holistic planning and wealth counseling.

Without the ability to efficiently leverage the data necessary for added-value services such as estate planning, tax advice, insurance and concierge services, advisors lose valuable time that could be spent serving existing clients or working to grow their businesses. To address this issue, enterprises need data services integrated into one platform that provides access to the information necessary to deliver attentive, differentiated client service—a key part of retaining clients and attracting new ones.

How A Lack Of Integration Affects Business Growth And Client Outcomes
According to Refinitiv research, advisors who incorporated digital tools in their practices saw a 74% spike in assets under management (AUM) and 77% increase in client retention. Using digital tools enables advisors to better understand their clients’ financial lives. This can help advisors provide more thoughtful guidance not only on their clients’ portfolios, but also on priorities such as college planning, caring for an elderly or disabled family member, buying a dream vacation home, or planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Without accessible data analytics, advisors cannot see the full picture to guide and coach their clients on their broader objectives, and the process of manually analyzing client data from multiple apps and sources is both time-consuming and rife with potential oversights. What if you’re not looking for the right things? What if you miss an important piece of information about a client’s life, family circumstances, spending behavior or short-term objectives? Busy advisors simply do not have the time to do all this data gathering themselves when, to keep their clients happy and grow their business, they need to prioritize relationship management.

What Does Truly Integrated Data Service Look Like?
A recent PWC study found that wealth management is one of the least tech-literate sectors in financial services, often due to lack of data integration. And while some technology platforms have attempted an integrated approach to handling data, what they consider “integration” is, in many cases, incomplete at best.

True integration requires all the data sets to be combined and cleaned in a single cohesive set, so advisors can quickly pinpoint the most accurate and insightful data possible.

For wealth management enterprises to offer additional integrated services, their systems must present a client-centric data model that offers a complete, easy-to-understand snapshot of the client’s financial life. These integrated data systems help an advisor see a client’s portfolios, insurance policies, bank accounts, retirement plans, real estate holdings, mortgages, credit card debt, education bills or debts, etc., accurately, all in one place.

How Does Integrated Data Help Advisors?
The benefits of an integrated data system go beyond giving advisors a more personal touch. According to a research study from Michael Kitces, the average financial plan takes 15 hours to create and a least three client meetings to finalize. Most advisors who participated in this study relied on many applications to supplement the writing of these plans. All the data system multitasking is a serious productivity drain.

Systems with a single, unified data fabric allow advisors at broker-dealers and roll-up RIAs to service clients in a broader, more interdisciplinary way. In addition to more efficiently creating financial plans, managing day-to-day tasks, prepping for client meetings and addressing incoming requests,advisors can also better coordinate tax advice, estate planning, charitable giving and other value-added services.

Advisors who use aggregated data sources from a single data fabric are also more prepared to keep their client portfolios on track, as they can rely on timely, precise and streamlined data updates to point out subtle nuances they may have missed on their own, allowing the advisor to take action both reactively and proactively. Tasks such as creating customized, accurate and fully consolidated up-to-date reports on demand are only possible through true integration.

Looking ahead, the need for data integration will continue to accelerate—for both financial advisors looking to attract more clients, and clients who expect more from their advisors in terms of enhanced service offerings, thoughtful counselling, attentive communication and achieving their long-term objectives.

To navigate the often-choppy waters of investing and planning, wealth management firms need to anchor themselves to a reliable, unified data platform that integrates and delivers information in a way that makes advisor workflow and client relationship management more efficient. A unified data fabric provides a strong foundation and makes a difference for wealth management enterprises looking to scale.

Rich Napolitano is CEO of Advisor360.