If advisors want to increase the human element of their practices, they might have to automate more of their processes, according to Oaks, Pa.-based SEI Advisor Network.

In a recent white paper, “The Next Wave of Advice Management,” SEI’s authors outline the collaborative, digitally enabled future of financial planning.

Co-planning is becoming more popular as the financial services industry moves from an advisors- and product-focused model into a client-centric world where the client demands advice at a specific scope and tailored to their specific needs, said John Anderson, SEI’s head of practice management.

“Financial planning has moved beyond holistic advice. Advisory firms today are offering a wide range of approaches to their clients,” Anderson said. “Advisors can now automate their procedures with technology and repeatable processes and still deliver customized solutions to their clients.”

Yet only 41 percent of financial advisor surveyed by SEI view financial planning as their core value proposition, and one in four identified explaining the value of a financial plan as a challenge.

The solution Anderson and SEI present is the “techno-advisor,” a human-digital hybrid that automates and scales while preserving the relationsip between planner and client.

But advisors may not know how to implement technology to facilitate financial planning. More than a quarter of the advisors in SEI’s survey said that they struggle to find the right technology to collaborate with their clients.

To enable more opportunities for financial planning, SEI advocates for advisors to create workflow processes to guide the way they work with clients.

A workflow process does not stand in the way of personalization, said Anderson, but makes room for advisors and clients to craft customized plans – and it frees up more client-facing time for advisors. SEI partnered with ActiFi to study the performance of 46 advisory firms implementing different workflows over a period of more than two years.

Workflows enable the delivery of financial plans. Before automation, the firms in the SEI/ActiFi analysis said that 35 percent of their clients received financial planning. After automation, the advisory practices said that 58 percent of their clients were receiving financial plans.

Before using automated workflows, 70 percent of the firms in SEI’s analysis said that they didn’t have enough time for client-related activities, but when the processes were implemented, only 41 percent of firms reported not having enough time for their clients.

Automation also improved human advisors’ familiarity with clients, the report said. Before automation, 65 percent of the advisors in SEI’s research said that knowledge of clients and activities were primarily stored in the memories of individual people – a number that dropped to 39 percent after automation was implemented.

Firms implementing automation were also more likely to use meeting agendas and conduct follow-up on client meetings and were more likely to have a coherent process for prospecting and onboarding clients. As a secondary benefit, workflow processes and automation may also help advisory practices avoid errors, the report said.

For the small segment of truly high-net-worth clients, with investible assets of more than $1 million, the planning process is still typically initiated by a human advisor – but that is not the case for less wealthy clients, only one-third of whom approach planning with the assistance of a human advisor, according to SEI.

The emerging future is one where investors have 24/7 access to their accounts and demand a seamless experience from their advisors, the report said, adding that most investors ready for financial planning are accustomed to opening their own accounts and starting the investing process themselves from their own computers, in their own homes.

Much of the industry already uses client portals and robo-advisory platforms to attract emerging affluent clients and scale their businesses, but few have mastered the process of moving digital prospects to full-fledged planning clients, according to SEI.

Clients no longer need advisors to make investment recommendations or execute trades as much as they need someone who understands their personal situation, is easy to work with, and makes few, if any, errors, SEI said. Anderson said that advisors who are error prone, difficult to access and are aloof from their cleints can’t succeed in the financial planning business.

SEI inverviewed 542 advisors in November and tracked the performance of 46 firms between September 2015 and December.