The key elements driving change here are personalization, timeliness, and compliance. Dynamic document creation offers a solution to all these issues and, because it’s cloud-based, can easily scale to meet the needs of the largest organizations. These tools can pull content from across the organization in real time to create presentations, reports, pitch books, and other materials. Using rules established by the company, they automatically incorporate the appropriate disclosures so that everything is fully compliant. Further, the content can be delivered across platforms and devices with everything formatted correctly.
This dynamism allows the advisor to present highly personalized and up-to–the-minute data in client meetings and new business presentations. It also saves time, eliminating the need to cobble together new PowerPoints manually for every meeting, and saving a trip to compliance for review of the finished product.
There’s a back end to this as well. Dynamic content can be linked back into CRM or other software, allowing marketing to better understand how presentations are used and what resonates with the client. This, in turn, leads to improved presentations, more productive interactions with clients, and more effective sales efforts.
Disruptive Technologies
Most advisors recognize wealth management as a “relationship” business. But underpinning those relationships are a host of technologies, and those technologies are evolving all the time. Some, like robo-advisors or the virtual advisor and remote advice model, have the potential to be highly disruptive, as McKinsey and others have noted. Others improve efficiency and client service without requiring fundamental changes to the business model.
There’s a mix of high touch and high technology that’s right for most every firm. For advisors and their firms, the challenge is to understand how these technologies are affecting investors’ preferences and behaviors, and be ready to adjust their marketing and distribution strategies accordingly.
Doug Winter is CEO of Seismic, a leading provider of cloud-based content automation solutions for the financial services industry.