The moment you begin to realize the potential that mobility can create for your business is a game-changer. For me, that moment occurred in 2011: I was sitting in a coffee shop with our chief technology officer, who showed me how I could access the new Envestnet app on my iPad. I was struck -- in fact, I was blown away -- by the fact that I had a window not only into my entire business, but into the entire financial industry, anytime, from anywhere I might be. It was a moment of extreme clarity, and I could see a future in which advisors would engage with clients in ways they had never thought possible. The opportunity to sit together and look at a wealth management strategy in real time, or to provide customized and paperless reports, would foster new levels of engagement; build stronger, more aligned relationships; and create a seamless experience for their clients across all devices.
At the time, when I looked at where the wealth management industry stood with mobile technology, it was obvious that we were lagging behind the investors we serve. (Indeed, we lagged behind the ways we ourselves used technology in our own personal lives.) While advisors’ connected clients used smartphones and tablets for entertainment or informational purposes, they were not benefitting from the same level of interaction with their wealth. If more advisors made their services mobile-friendly, I thought, investors could make managing their investment strategy part of their own technology ecosystem and tie together all the information they are consuming with actionable steps regarding their investments.
In 2011, it felt ahead of the curve. Today, it feels like necessity. The good news for advisors is that the capabilities are actually there today; you have access to tools to make the tech-savvy investor feel integrated with your service model.
More Connectivity, Please
We are in the midst of a historic period in wealth management, in which mobility represents a transformational shift from an item of convenience to a tool essential to the way advisors do business in the 21st century. With the explosion of mobile applications, a tidal wave of information has become available to the individual investor. Investors now have the ability to aggregate their accounts into a single portfolio and run analytics on it themselves. For investors today and in the future, advisors need to catch up and at least provide their clients with the same capabilities they can access on the Web, frequently at no charge. In my opinion, the future entails a digital storefront for advisors that rivals the direct-to-investor capabilities that are emerging today.
When we look at how advisors are using mobile technology, we see a bell-shaped curve: fully integrated practices on one end, the totally non-mobile on the other and the majority of advisors sitting somewhere in the middle. We believe, however, that once advisors experience the power of having their entire wealth management platform on a mobile device -- including client profiles, research, portfolio analysis and investment vehicles, along with the ability to execute trades and develop customized reports from anywhere -- they too will have that game-changing realization and move toward the leading edge.
Freedom To Lead
It is a liberating experience for an advisor to step away from the desktop and still have the same infrastructure and practice management capabilities at hand. Ultimately, advisors who embrace mobility can expect to realize greater efficiencies and discover better ways to serve their clients. This is not the time for advisors who have been slow to come on board to wonder about when the demand will drive greater adoption of mobile technology. Rather, they should be wondering, what will happen when unhappy clients shift assets to those advisors who can provide it?
For some advisors, this may mean staying ahead of the curve by adding mobile applications to their technology toolboxes even though many of their current clients might not be ready to use them. But as more assets are transferred to next-generation clients, and those clients become more active and engaged with their investments, advisors who have this technology in place will be significantly less likely to have to play catch-up in the future.
Mobility and constant connectivity have made investors hungry for more information, transparency and personalized context from their advisors. They want to better understand their investment risks and the steps they can take to mitigate them. But more and more investors want to do all of this from the convenience of a mobile device and integrate management of their investments with all the other activities they currently perform on their phones and tablets. Advisors should seize the opportunity to feed their clients’ appetites for information and create a mobile experience similar to what clients have come to expect from banking, travel and other service providers they have already integrated into their mobile lives. Very soon, this may no longer seem like a feature, but will become a necessity.
Bill Crager serves as president of Envestnet and has been with the company since its founding in 2000. He leads Envestnet's platform, product and relationship management efforts. Prior to joining Envestnet, Crager served as managing director at Nuveen Investments beginning in 1997 and prior to that for Rittenhouse Financial Services beginning in 1994, a leader in the managed account industry.