Advisors with the best digital footprints are creating content across all available media, offering streamlined client onboarding experiences, and are adding automation and self-service to their digital capabilities. “It then goes all the way to the back office,” Christensen says. “Those who have great integrations with their CRM are going to have more efficient practices, and will be able to grow faster.”
In a digital world, clients and prospects can easily research how their advisors interact with others and work within their communities. Advisors also need to be aware of the overlap between their professional and personal social media presences, because clients and prospects are watching both and doing their own research.
3. Regulators are catching up to new technology.
As the number of touch points with clients increase, compliance departments will struggle to keep up with the tide. That’s one area where artificial intelligence may assist advisory firms.
Advisors aren’t the only players in the financial services arena who have been caught sleeping as technology has accelerated. Regulators also have struggled to keep up.
Covid-19 changed that. As the volume of digital communications has increased, firms have struggled to keep up with the compliance requirements. To compensate, many firms are creating enterprise-wide content for their advisors so that the wheel won’t have to be reinvented every time a single advisor wants to create digital outreach.
“Doing that takes some of the burden off of their compliance team,” Christensen says. “We’re seeing firms creating entire webinars, landing pages, introductory e-mails and PowerPoint presentations for their advisors, so that there’s everything ready to go. … They’re getting ahead of [each individual advisor] trying to do their own thing and overloading compliance.”
But in the rush to create digital content, many firms have posted videos to platforms like YouTube and Vimeo without retaining the original hard copy of the content—usually an mp4 file. Moving forward, that practice may not fly with regulators.
4. M&A, a wave of retirements and professional poaching will accelerate changes in the industry.
Consolidation in the profession, as evidenced by the ongoing wave of mergers and advisor retirements, is also spurring a move toward automation.
“Most companies have us put their team members on their website, and we track that information—so we know how many team members are parts of a given firm,” Christensen says. “Starting in March and April, we saw a significant uptick in individual advisor practices deciding to join other firms.”
Calls from firms to merge accounts elevated to twice their previous levels as the pandemic locked down the economy, he says. If an advisor moving toward retirement saw a merger as his or her succession plan, “this might have seemed like a good time to be done and therefore not have to learn a lot of new things and change the way you do business,” he says.
5. Mobile, location-independent interactions have become the best channel providing financial advice.
Even during a year when many advisors were required to work from home at their desktop personal computers, there’s been a shift to more mobile-oriented operations.
“The number of communications that advisors sent out that were intended to be consumed on a mobile device has increased consistently,” Christensen says. “Advisors working with us are clamoring more and more for a truly mobile experience.”
Advisors, as well as clients and prospects, enjoy the ease of mobile applications, where they can “swipe” to ask and answer questions and change elements of their plans, he says.
Christensen also mentions a couple of other trends. “From a fintech standpoint, we’re seeing that there’s a desire to have both the option of buying a bundled experience and buying unbundled point solutions,” he says. “Advisors are often on a journey with their technology. The first thing they want might be an online brand experience. They can do that with a website and editorial content. Then, later, they want technology that enables better client relationships. Then, after that, they want to figure out digital prospecting.”