Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions has begun to roll out a series of technology platform enhancements designed to streamline advisors’ day-to-day work, allowing them to focus more on adding greater value for clients through activities like financial planning, according to a company release.
The company said it is transforming the way advisors do business with a new, fully digital account onboarding experience in Wealthscape, its advisor technology platform. The rollout is the first in a series of Wealthscape platform enhancements planned for 2020.
In addition to creating greater efficiency for advisors, the experience simplifies onboarding for their clients by reducing the volume of information that they review throughout the onboarding process by nearly 20%, the release said.
Fidelity said the new onboarding experience enables advisors to digitally open individual brokerage accounts, fund accounts through transfer of assets and add features such as asset movement authorization, all without the use of paper.
The new experience, a departure from print-centric forms, gives investors a concise snapshot of only the relevant data and disclosures needed for a transaction, reducing the number of pages they need to review to open an account by around 75%, Fidelity said. The result is a faster authorization for investors and a simplified verification process for advisors.
Lisa Burns, head of platform technology at Fidelity Institutional, said enhancing technology that saves advisors time is a top priority because it helps them focus more on building deeper relationships with clients.
“Time is the most valuable commodity advisors have, and more than half of advisors we surveyed said they lose out on valuable client face time because of account-opening paperwork, so we completely digitized the onboarding experience to give advisors, home offices and investors a more efficient way to handle many of their everyday tasks,” she said.
Among other Wealthscape updates included in the rollout for advisors and clients are a new user interface that guides advisors through account onboarding and shows them only what’s required for that account; the ability for advisors to search for, retrieve and populate data twice as quickly with expanded prefill capabilities; multi-transaction bundles, which allow advisors to combine multiple transactions into a single e-mail for easier client approvals; and more authentication methods, including SMS text messaging and phone, adding flexibility and ease of use.