Personalized portals
Modernizing the advisor experience
Financial service clients want more than just investment performance.
They want quality interactions with advisors, helpful advice on how best to proceed with life events, and relevant guidance on achieving their specific goals.
The key to success? Personalized experience.
So, what’s holding financial advisors back?
The top five pain points in the advisor experience
- Siloed systems and tools
The more time advisors spend juggling multiple systems for administrative tasks like data entry, reconciliation, and systems navigation, the less time they have to focus on adding value to the end-client experience. - Lack of process standardization
Without standardized processes, there can be confusion about the correct way to complete specific tasks, especially for newly onboarded advisors. This means inefficiencies throughout the advisor network and quality control issues. - Lack of information to deepen client relationships
Advisors can have trouble strengthening relationships with their clients when they lack the insights or support to individually tailor their discussions. Existing tools are unable to effectively track and provide nuanced insights. - Aging model doesn’t fit today’s needs
Current systems have a heavy focus on wealth products and investment returns. However, clients and advisors are now looking for a goals-based, advice-driven model that better aligns with their needs. - Inaccurate data and unhelpful insights
Only 26% of advisors currently use (or have access to) data and analytics to better understand and serve their clients. Unintegrated internal systems or third-party service providers, coupled with a lack of reconciliation among data sources across the organization means advisors can’t rely on and trust the insights provided by their existing tools.
What does all this tell us?
Advisors need an integrated digital platform that allows them to better navigate the complexities of the advisor-led client journey and intimate knowledge of their clients’ needs and preferences.
Giving advisors better operational productivity will be a key driver for future growth, a better client experience, and attracting top talent.
Building a best-in-class advisor desktop will be a critical catalyst for this future: an omnichannel, integrated digital platform that helps remove some of the complexity and manual tasks associated with current-state processes. Advisors can then spend more time doing what many of them love most about their work—deepening relationships with their clients. And they can do so equipped with better-tailored, practical insights and advisory services for every client.
Why it matters
An advisor desktop can bring focus on moments that matter—life stages such as marriage and retirement that clients often seek advice on—giving advisors more time to personally communicate with their clients.
An advisor desktop should also focus on replacing previously manual work and providing real-time insights that support growth. These include next-best-action technology, straight-through processing, and digital onboarding integration. These tools have been shown to materially improve advisor productivity by about 25%. Advisors can gather a more holistic view of a client’s finances, goals, and objectives and ultimately design better portfolios. The right technology for advisors can mean lower attrition rates overall, given that 21% of clients switch banks due to a lack of relevant and personalized advice.
While developing and implementing such a solution is not without difficulty (advisor adoption, key capability coverage, legacy systems, etc.), the use of digital enabling tools has been shown to increase market share by about 4%, highlighting the positive effect that a strong strategy, development, and implementation process for enabling technology can have on an advisor network.
Some of the benefits of advisor technology investments
25% improvement in all advisor productivity, freeing up time for client
discussions
11% growth in client base by centralizing client data to leverage insights
4% uplift in market share through the use of digital tools such as an advisor desktop
Temperature check: today’s market
A need for stronger ties to one advisor
For about 35% of Canadian customers, access to a dedicated go-to person for financial management and advice is one of the drivers for switching primary banks.
Desire for total wealth advisory
Advisors are increasingly expected to provide advice across the entire wealth journey, as two out of three Canadian investors discuss with them important life goals such as retirement and buying a home.
Access to enabling tools
Advisors require robust tools and technology as table-stakes infrastructure to efficiently service and intelligently grow their books of business through insight-based recommendations.
Our five-part solution
Building an effective advisor desktop requires an intimate understanding of client and advisor needs. Here are five components you’ll need to prioritize when building this digital solution:
The advisor desktop is a one-stop shop to enable and enhance the end-to-end, front-office value proposition, employing multiple components to cover moments that matter.
Want to know how an advisor desktop could work for your organization?
