[Technology is never static, especially in our current business-operating environment of accelerating rates of change. As the chief tool for innovation, tech is now on an iterative journey between technologists and their endpoint clients. The goal is to continuously address challenges and opportunities as they develop and provide practical solutions that are targeted, easy to use, and faster in delivery.
The need for speed and the ability to deliver engaging, real-time advice in client conversations can be a key differentiator in our hyper-competitive financial marketplace. With the ever-growing data explosion and social media noise that clients have to deal with, information overload reduces decision quality and breeds inaction. It can be a great motivator and a much-needed solution for clients if technology can be wielded to clarify and direct a clear course of action.
To get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how a fintech company creates the next evolution of their product to address these issues, we reached out to Institute member Adam Holt, CEO and founder of Asset-Map — an award-winning client engagement and financial visualization software for financial planners. We asked probing questions to better understand how they go about designing a better experience for advisors and their clients.]
Bill Hortz: What was your motivation behind your decision to rethink financial planning?
Adam Holt: Even though it is starting to happen, Asset-Map’s vision was not originally to revolutionize the financial planning and engagement process. That is not to say that we are completely reinventing the wheel, it just turns out that the ‘wheel’ used in financial planning for years is often too big for the road most professionals drive in modern client engagements.
Today, we all want nimble, fast, stylish, clear, and easy-to-use tools. So, the timing was right to scale out a redesigned wheel for the modern terrain. What we are really talking about is compressing the financial planning process by removing the bulk and intimidation felt at the consumer level, as well as decluttering the unneeded content and capability at the advisor level to try to produce more effective conversations. All of this ultimately helps facilitates better conversations around making financial decisions.
As an artist who always tries to communicate more effectively, I recognize that the fact-finding process and getting to know a client was where most of the aha moments happened during the financial planning process. In other words, the most important aspects of the profession include understanding who is important to the household, why they made certain decisions historically, what they care about today, what is clearly missing from their financial repertoire, and whether they are on track for their major goals.
This interaction is what I refer to as the “point-of-advice.” Like many other businesses consider the point-of-sale to be the most important environment to control or influence, I happen to think the critical point-of-advice is the moment when two people sit down together and agree to make changes that serve their household’s agenda for the better. Making that engagement experience faster and more effective is really what we are doing.
Hortz: Can you share with us the research and development process that went into designing this next-level experience for your users?
Holt: We have field-tested Asset-Map for the past 15 years in printed report environments, digital presentations, interactive Smart Boards, screen sharing, and mobile devices in order to get a clear idea of how financial professionals interact with their clients in the planning and engagement process. There are a couple of things that really stand out from that research over time. Many of those insights center around behavioral finance and yet others are simply nuances of societal norms, an advisor’s technology infrastructure, basic human needs, and education.
One example of that research that I find especially interesting is how the current consumers of advice were taught in a traditional classroom. In these early developmental years, an instructor stood in front of a board and educated their seated students based upon visualizations they drew with chalk on a blackboard. That historical authority figure for most clients is subliminal, and the credibility given to an educator who has no other agenda than to help their student learn is a disarming and altruistic memory for many.
An interesting aspect of Asset-Map is that one of the highest satisfaction responses we get from a client engagement is an advisor standing and presenting a client's Asset-Map Report interactively at a digital board and educating them on existing strategies while communicating from a frame of teaching. Like students that are present in a class to learn, that embedded response for engagement gets triggered if the visualization and the topic are both interactive and consumable.
Alternatively, if the “teacher/advisor” gets too advanced in the typical financial planning tables, charts, and graphs, then we see the same expected response in students that start shutting down when the technical knowledge exceeds their interest or capacity. And this later example is how most financial planning loses the client through the jargon and a lack of technical familiarity. It’s no wonder why most consumers of financial advice complain of lack of transparency and complex communication.
The takeaway is that any presentation is going to be more effective if it engages the viewer and attempts to educate by connecting what a client does not understand - with what they do understand. Visualization of financial relationships continues to be a force multiplier in engagement.
Hortz: How do you design your software to deliver advice faster? How do you design for speed?
Holt: The key to delivering advice faster is to get to the point faster. And there is nothing that speaks to opportunities to both fix current financial decisions and fill current gaps in the financial picture than an actual image of a household’s details and prior decisions. We have noticed that when a visualization of all of the facts is organized on the screen, the outliers cannot hide.
In other words, the fact that somebody is underinsured is not lost on page 57 of 80. It is literally on the screen in front of everyone to see. The realization that someone does not have enough emergency reserves is clearly apparent, and the fact that somebody has too many accounts in multiple places (likely being overcharged and undermanaged), is not obscure when there is an Asset-Map in front of everyone revealing those truths. So, the first aspect of speed comes down to removing the information obscurities to address the real issues.