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    Highlights From The 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference

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    Executive Summary

    In the last week of October, executive leadership from numerous independent broker-dealers and large RIAs gathered in South Florida for the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference (as differentiated from the T3 Advisor Conference that is predominantly attended by individual/independent advisors). Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting Services, the two-day conference mixed networking, panel sessions, and vendor presentations, focused more on enterprise-level solutions.

    In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured new enterprise-level AdvisorTech offerings, interviews with industry leaders around emerging financial planning trends, and discussions on the challenges (and opportunities) that firms face in a rapidly-changing landscape.

    Craig kicks off his recap highlighting Shirl Penney’s observation that fear and inertia are preventing advisors from going independent, but notes that they're also limiting countless advisory firms who won’t let go of their legacy technology (thus keeping legacy vendors in business). Also casting a long shadow over the proceedings was the Black Friday Crash of (Trading) Commissions, which Penney predicts will lead custodians to start charging for their technology (although Craig points out that there are far more intriguing possibilities for new revenue streams… particularly for smaller RIAs).

    Another major theme permeating discussions at this year’s T3 Enterprise conference was the ongoing difficulties with vendor integrations. David Ballard from Ladenburg Thalmann pointed out that firms looking to integrate technology stacks and databases experience too many headaches, and that vendors should take the lead on building those integrations amongst themselves before pushing them out to the end-user.

    Other highlights included presentations from:

    • InterGen Data, which combines government census data with other demographic data sets to deliver unique insights into future life events that could have a significant impact on clients and their families;
    • Whealthcare Planning, whose platform gives advisors tools to help with challenges their aging clients are facing, including helping retirees letting go of their independence around decision-making, driving, and domicile;
    • BidMoni, whose FiduciaryShield aims to create a marketplace to connect advisors with service providers when supporting company retirement plans (e.g., record keepers, custodians and TPAs);
    • Morningstar, which introduced Goal Bridge, a financial planning add-on for Advisor Workstation aimed not at selling financial products, but at selling data and analytics instead; and;
    • Mike Ragunas, CIO of Cetera Financial, who presented details around their implementation of AdvicePay for their new subscription-based direct billing platform.

    Ultimately, the 2019 T3 Enterprise Conference brought together a wide range of vendors and firm leaders with the goal of exploring ways to bring real value to their clients through improving the onboarding process and overall experience, while finding opportunities to increase integrations in order to improve firm efficiency and client retention. And, with the trend towards consolidation and aggregation of data and accounts, it behooves fintech providers to focus on integrations and making sure that the user experience is fast, painless, and seamless… or they can be sure that someone else will.

    Author: Craig Iskowitz

    Guest Contributor

    Craig Iskowitz is CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a management consulting firm providing advice to the financial services industry on marketing and technology strategy. Ezra Group works with RIA’s, broker-dealers and banks to help them make sound technology decisions, identify growth opportunities and energize their marketing.  Craig is also the publisher of the blog Wealth Management Today, which provides in-depth analysis of trends and issues facing the wealth management industry. Craig can be reached at [email protected].

    Read more of Craig’s articles here.

    "Fear & inertia are what's keeping financial advisors stuck at wirehouses."
    ~ Shirl Penney, CEO, Dynasty Financial Partners

    I loved this quote from Shirl so much that I was going to use it as the title for this article. It was going to be, "Fear and Inertia in Ft. Lauderdale at the T3 Enterprise Conference". Using a play on the title of the 1998 black comedy starring Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thomson, who wrote the 1971 novel that the movie was based on.

    But then I thought better of it and went with a more conventional headline.

    What's interesting is that the fear and inertia are not only holding back advisors from making changes, it's just as large of an impediment for broker-dealers, banks, asset managers and the other enterprises that we work with. Fear and inertia have limited the potential of many wealth management firms who can't replace their legacy systems as much as it has kept those legacy technology vendors in business.

    "To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
    ~ Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and mathematician

    The T3 Enterprise Conference 2019 is a much-hyped event every year and Joel Bruckenstein and his team delivered a premium event that contained just the right mix of panel sessions, vendor presentations and networking to make the trip to Florida more than worth the time.

    The enterprise conference differs from the Advisor Conference in that the client firms and vendors are skewed towards the enterprise side. You don't see many small RIAs here and individual advisors are almost non-existent. But that's the point. It is designed to deliver what enterprise executives need to know in a tightly scheduled, jam-packed few days of activity. It might require dozens of meetings to get even a fraction of the information you can consume in 48 hours of conference.

    Welcome to my social media-driven conference summary, which I've designed to deliver a quick overview of the whirlwind of activities including interviews, product demos, speakers, and two dozen or so panel sessions. If you made it to the conference, please add a comment below about your favorite speaker or panel. And if you missed it, go ahead and post a comment about which parts of the summary you liked the most.

    Financial Planning

    InterGen Data

    This is one of those innovative companies that shows us what it's like to think outside the box. A lot of the new entrants into the wealthtech space over the past few years are mostly additions to existing categories. The tenth risk profiling tool or fifteenth financial planning software. But InterGen Data has done something different, marrying demographic and health data with financial planning to deliver a differentiated experience for advisors.

    The CEO of InterGen Data, Rob Kirk, said that data is the fabric that can weave together disparate technology. His firm combines government census data with other demographic data sets to deliver unique insights into future life events that could have a significant impact on clients and their families. This information would be immensely helpful to anyone trying to plan their future, yet no financial planning applications currently include this data!

    Part of the analysis provided by InterGen Data is related to the probability of disease. This is not at all the same as when companies analyze your DNA and calculate the probability of being afflicted. It is purely based on self-reported demographics and family history. But it is still extremely useful for clients who are interested in preparing for life's contingencies.

    They also put out a great showing at last year's Orion Advisor FUSE Hackathon where they built an integration into Amazon Alexa that enabled a client to not only open a new account entirely by voice, but also query the database on when they would be most likely to get married, buy a house and have kids. Very cool!

    Advicent

    Advicent COO and Uber-Style-Guru Tony Stich flew all the way from Wisconsin down to sunny Florida to hit us with some trends in financial planning.

    I thought Tony's three waves of financial planning was perceptive:

    • First wave: cash flow based, reserved for most affluent clients
    • Second wave: goals-based, limited analysis, speed over accuracy
    • Third wave: a synthesis of goals-based and cash flow models, collaborative planning, greater advisor autonomy

    However, I think there is a fourth wave of integrated financial planning that is so tightly woven into the advisor technology ecosystem that you almost don't even know it's there. This built-in functionality is called "lite" planning and covers just the basics that a large percentage of the population, mostly mass affluent, would need. (See Is BlackRock-Envestnet Deal a Tipping Point for Lite Financial Planning?)

    This is one of the reasons why wealth management platform vendors are snapping up financial planning software companies. Orion Advisor's recent purchase of Advizr was expressly for this purpose. Envestnet has already bought two planning firms! (See Diamond in the Rough: Orion Finds a Financial Planning Gem in Advizr)

    Here's a question for you... Why do we even have stand-alone financial planning applications? Because that's the way advisors have always used them. As separate data silos that they task switch back and forth to and from. That's not efficient from a workflow perspective and not good design from a data perspective.

    Combining financial planning with the rest of the wealth management process is not only good for advisors... it's also good for clients. They're going to have more integrated experiences and see fewer separate reports. All of the data should be centralized and shared across the enterprise so that every client's goals are tracked and managed effectively at every point in the process. This is how true holistic advice will be delivered.

    Another terrific graphic from Stich that illustrates how workflows have expanded for financial planning beyond the traditional. But I think this diagram over-simplifies things. There are already hybrids of the hybrids and combinations in different ways. Clients can start with the digital self-directed, switch to electronic fact finder and finish with an in-person discovery meeting. Advisory firms will need to offer flexibility for clients to interact when and where they want.

    I'm going to disagree with Tony on this list. These items are essential to *some* financial plans, mostly to clients with a lot of money. The vast majority of people will not need estate planning, custom savings plans or debt optimization. What more people need is help with budgeting and everyday expense management. This is why mobile apps like Acorns and MoneyLion are killing it with Millennials and younger demographics to the tune of 10X the number of users of traditional robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment. (See Acorns: We're Not Just Gathering Assets, We're Building a Brand)

    Whealthcare Planning

    Dr. Carolyn McClanahan, the co-founder of Whealthcare Planning, said that their mission is to help older adults and their families make better financial decisions by implementing health care into wealth planning. Demographic shifts are one of the reasons advisors are increasingly discussing memory alongside risk tolerance. By 2035, there will be some 78 million people in the U.S. aged 65 and older.

    McClanahan explained that their platform gives advisors tools to help with the four main challenges of their aging clients:

    1. Move to a safer living situation
    2. Transfer financial decision making
    3. Get help with healthcare decisions
    4. Give up driving

    Speaking from experience, I can say that all of these challenges are difficult!

    This type of oversight is long overdue considering how long unscrupulous charlatans have been preying on senior citizens.

    Morningstar Goal Bridge

    Considering Morningstar's huge user base of advisors across their myriad of technology solutions, it's not surprising that they've been thinking about how to tie things together better. Building their own financial planning software makes sense considering they already have a strong market position in proposal generation and portfolio analytics and constructions. Goal Bridge can be the glue that ties the two together into a more seamless experience.

    My initial reaction it that it seems as though Morningstar is chasing Blackrock's iRetire free financial planning tool with one big difference. Morningstar isn't trying to use their software to sell you ETFs. They want to sell you data and analytics instead. An intuitive interface should help attract a decent share of the 100,000+ advisors who use one of the Morningstar software systems. It makes sense to tie your planning and client goals to asset allocations and investment models. I'd like to see how the long-term monitoring of goals works and how advisors are alerted when clients are trending away from their goal targets. (See Ep 12: #ItsOnWealthtech How Morningstar Quietly Built a Huge Welathtech Business with Dermot O’Mahony)

    I'm sure this sounded like a terrific feature when the product management team was sitting around brainstorming ideas for Goal Bridge. Assigning a different asset allocation to each goal adds another layer of complexity to an already complex process and complex piece of software. Remember that the vast majority of advisors do not use a standalone financial planning application for a number of reasons. The biggest one is that they're just too complicated and aren't worth the investment in time required to learn them and create plans using them.

    If Goal Bridge is going to succeed they need to think Easy Button everywhere. Separate asset allocations for every goal is not easier. It's harder.

    Also, the world is moving away from managing individual accounts and towards managing relationships at the household level. Everything we see in the market is consolidating and aggregating data and accounts, not breaking them down. This feature may be useful for a very small percentage of advisors, but it's not what's going to make Goal Bridge successful.

    Tbd

    Evolving Role of Financial Planning at RIAs

    The Advisor Warrior, Charlotte Geletka, was on stage with Joel Bruckenstein to share her insights on financial planning from an advisor's point of view. As the managing partner of an RIA with $230mm+ in assets, she has a lot of experience and best practices to share.

    Geletka, managing partner at Silver Penny Financial, is so right about this! Too many advisors think that financial planning is about the report that comes out at the end of the process. What they should be focusing on is the process itself and educating the client along the way.

    This reminds me a lot of the introduction I usually give when we start a project to gather requirements for a request for proposal (RFP) for a wealth management platform or other technology. The goal of the exercise isn't just the end document, it's equally as much about generating discussions, encouraging conversations and getting everyone on the same page by the end of the process. The document at the end is a report on how well we did.

    Another reason why most advisors will never need a separate planning tool. When they're just starting out and still learning the ropes of being an advisor. Simpler tools will enable them to provide basic planning to their clients, who are probably younger and have less assets, so they would be a good fit for them.

    The number of choices of lite planning software has exploded. Morningstar's Goal Bridge is just the latest. Lots of vendors have not only built out lite planning, but have transformed it into a lead generation tool. By making it self-directed and launching it from an advisor's website, this enables prospective clients to walk themselves through the process, which can deliver a lot more useful information to the advisor to help close the sale.

    Is this 50% mostly younger clients or a mix of ages? It seems that the industry is hearing this message loud and clear based on the number of broker-dealers and RIA aggregators that are upgrading their technology platforms. Our clients are racing to improve both client and advisor experience and thinking about innovative ways to deliver advice. (See The Velocity of Technology Change is Increasing: What Can Advisors Do To Keep Up?)

    Speaking of velocity, no area has been improving faster than client experience (CX). I’m excited by the Netflix-like CX from Envestnet MoneyGuide in their Blocks widgets. It’s clean, beautiful and intuitive because it’s familiar to 99% of the population. Now we’re all surprised that no one else thought of this sooner. Have you ever noticed how a lot of wealth management software all looks the same?

    Interview with Shirl Penney

    I think half the sessions at this conference were talking about the impact of free commissions and this one was no different as Brian Hamburger, Founder and Managing Member of the Hamburger Law Firm, posed the question to Shirl Penney, CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners. Penney's answer was that "all roads are leading to the RIA space," but this is not entirely true. Broker-dealers have been nudging their advisors to move towards more fee-based business since the DOL Rule was first proposed. More and more advisors are less reliant on commission-based business than ever before. While the RIA space is a tempting destination, especially with the power of an aggregator/network like Dynasty, Carson or United Capital behind you, it's also not for everyone.

    While fear and inertia are certainly factors in keeping many advisors from taking the plunge, many advisors just don't want to run their own business and are perfectly happy being an employee with someone else taking care of all the headaches.

    Penney even shared a stat that would give many wirehouse advisors pause before making the leap to independence: As RIA’s grow from $300-$1B AUM, advisor compensation doesn’t increase! What? You can triple your assets and not increase what you're taking home? He explained that this was due to firms having to add so much staff that it limited their scalability. There's something to be said for being your own boss, but I think a lot of advisors would expect it to come with an increase in pay as well.

    Penney also predicted that due to the Black Friday Crash of Commissions, custodians would have to start charging for their technology to remain profitable. Technology has been a loss leader for custodians for so long, I'm not sure they would even know what to charge if they could. I'm sure there are executives huddling up with spreadsheets trying to figure out how to plug those revenue gaps. But I'm not sure that technology is the right place to start hitting up advisors. There are too many other options available that become much more interesting once you take away the cost differential. This is especially true for the very small RIAs.

    IBD Panel

    Yes, Joel, we have all been said the same thing over and over. Maybe finally people are listening?!

    I think that David Ballard, Senior VP, Enterprise Services at Ladenburg Thalmann expressed the same frustration that exists at many of our broker-dealer clients. It seems that vendors wait for a client to ask for an integration before putting in the effort to connect. Any connectivity between separate firms, with separate technology stacks and databases, needs time to mature. If your company is the first one to work with an integration, get ready for lots of problems!

    If vendors could build the necessary integrations between themselves and test them to ensure that they're ready for prime time before deploying at the customer, it would save a lot of headaches. Ballard, who just took this job back in April, will have more integrations than he can handle soon as it was just announced that Ladenburg is merging with Advisor Group. Although, this will be a homecoming of sorts for Ballard, who spent almost seven years at Advisor Group as their CIO and COO.

    Mike Ragunas, CIO of Cetera Financial shared details on their success with the new subscription-based direct billing platform AdvicePay. They're easily the largest client for the new billing offering, which was founded by former advisor Alan Moore and industry icon Michael Kitces. I'm expecting to see a number of similar offerings as broker-dealers realize the benefits of enabling their advisors to directly bill their clients and fee for service offerings expand. Someone always needs to be the first and then the rest of the industry will follow.

    I also expect subscription pricing to take off and be as disruptive, if not more, than zero commissions. More clients are billed asset-based fees than commissions and more of them will start investigating subscription pricing as they learn more about how it can benefit them. They will also start asking why their fees double when their assets double, but the amount of work the advisor is doing does not go up very much.

    Ragunas also mentioned that they're looking for other new technology offerings that can fill in gaps in their existing infrastructure. One example is that they have partnered with FMGSuite on their new Marketing Central platform.

    Account opening is often the first experience that new clients have with a wealth management firm's technology platform. Research has shown that the initial onboarding experience can have a profound effect on future client referrals. Firms that provide a low-effort onboarding experience can potentially double their number of client referrals. But not having access to the right data is a growing problem facing many wealth management onboarding processes, according to Will Trout, Head of Wealth Management for Celent.

    The old way of doing business that involved cobbling together a lot of different point solutions doesn't pass muster any longer, Trout explained. Those disparate systems rarely worked together seamlessly and could result in lost data or errors in critical regulatory functions such as KYC and AML or standard business functions of portfolio management and document processing. We're seeing the industry moving beyond this fragmented environment to a more tightly integrated approach. (See The Secret Sauce in the Top 6 Client Onboarding Vendors)

    Rob Pettman describes the launch of a suite of TAMP services where advisors can create their own models and outsource the trading to LPL. Trading is no longer an area of differentiation, he explained, it’s become more of an operational burden. This new service will enable LPL advisors to focus more of their time and efforts on enhancing their value-added services rather than back-office processing.

    WealthTech Table Stakes

    Rich Keltner, Director of Product Management for Fiserv Investment Services, spoke about how the table stakes have shifted for wealth management platform providers.

    I thought that all of these points were valid and outcome-oriented approaches and financial wellness were the most important for clients. For too long, advisors have been solely focused on investments that generate asset-based fees, which have become commoditized. You can't compete with Vanguard and other asset management giants on cost, so advisors have to branch out and become more involved as life coaches for clients. That's where the real value is and how they can defend their practices against encroachment by digital advice offerings.

    Podcast Station

    Through a partnership with T3 and Impact Communications, I set up a mobile podcasting station at the conference. We had a terrific lineup of guests with a mix of technology vendors and broker-dealer executives all sharing their views on industry trends and the latest news.

    The man himself, Joel Bruckenstein, producer of the T3 enterprise conferences, sat down to talk about their new Cybersecurity University, which will be offering a certificate for RIAs to demonstrate to regulators that they are staying abreast of security issues.

    Robert Sofia, CEO of marketing automation firm Snappy Kraken, gave me the rundown on how he managed to score two huge additions to their board of directors: Aaron Klein, CEO of Riskalyze and Marty Bicknell, CEO of Mariner Wealth Advisors. As the marketing automation space for advisors starts to take off, Snappy Kraken will need this firepower to help fuel their growth as they compete for larger clients.

    It's tough to stand out in the space for risk profiling tools, but Andes Wealth has built some innovative features into their product including behavioral finance that should help advisors know their clients better and identify at-risk accounts.

    Nick Graham, Chief Technology Officer of Cambridge Investment Research, shared their approach for integrating different platforms and databases. They've designed their infrastructure to provide flexibility from a systems engineering standpoint, with underlying architecture that can support multiple advisor views.

    Retirement Plan Marketplace for Advisors

    We are constantly monitoring products and services in the expanding categories of wealth management technology. We're always excited when someone exhibits out of the box thinking and produces something that create an entirely new category.

    Stephen Daigle, CEO of a company called BidMoni, has developed a new product that could shake things up in the retirement market. It is called FiduciaryShield, and it's designed to be a marketplace that connects advisors with retirement plan services they need to support company retirement plans including record keepers, custodians and TPAs.

    The FiduciaryShield marketplace allows advisors to search for vendors and compare costs. All of this work currently has to be done manually by advisors. Daigle reports that their current advisor clients are seeing an average savings of 57% over the way they are researching vendors now.

    Daigle also pitches the regulatory angle of his product since financial advisors are required as fiduciaries to monitor the record keeper and financial investments in every ERISA plan that they manage.

    Their integration with DocuSign allows advisors to click a Change Plan button and kick off an electronic onboarding process. Another feature that is standard in other parts of the business, but almost non-existent in retirement plans.

    Client Onboarding

    I like what LPL has done with their new client onboarding process. Of course, it's important to constantly upgrade your technology to bring new features and functionality to advisors and clients, it's also necessary to think about the user experience inside the new technology and how it compares to the old. Shiny new screens and buttons are terrific, but don't forget the human side of the equation.

    The LPL U/X team spent time to analyze every step of the onboarding process to reduce the number of clicks as well as the screen scrolling required to open an account. They came out with a significant reduction in touches required.

    At the LPL Advisor Conference, Kirby Horan-Adams, Executive VP, Investor and Investment Solutions, announced a goal to have 90% of fields pre-populated when opening new accounts for existing clients. This is a big increase in efficiency for both advisors and clients!

    It’s a race between firms to roll out new software that improves the advisor and client experiences the most. But it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, since it is a never-ending process. At this conference alone, I heard more than half a dozen firms state that they were in the middle of rolling out a new advisor dashboard or client portal or client onboarding workflow.

    One common point across all of these projects is deeper integrations between disparate applications which can improve the flow of data, increase flexibility and enhance the user experience.

    I sat down with Brian Wilson from AdvisoryWorld to get a demo of some of the new integrations that have been enabled since the acquisition. Advisors are now able to bring in custom models that they created in ClientWorks into a new proposal which gives them a lot more flexibility to customize their proposals with their own investment strategies. At least, they can do it without having to manually reenter the data every time they create a proposal.

    LPL and AdvisoryWorld has added stress testing to their proposal generation that enables advisors to show clients how their portfolio would have performed under various adverse market conditions. This feature has been available for a long time on many other platforms, so this closes a gap between ClientWorks and the third-party wealth management platforms that many LPL advisors are using.

    According to a recent report by Celent on digital onboarding, the foundational role of data and of digital tools has brought a reworked understanding of the value of the onboarding process. In addition to reducing cost and operational risk, the opportunity presented by digital opportunity technology centers around the increased potential to increase revenue that is inherent in every new client relationship. While there are high fixed costs centering on the advisor or relationship manager, they can be spread out by optimizing the channel, product, and servicing decisions. (See Advisor Group's eQuipt is a Quantum Leap in Onboarding Technology)

    It's All About Scalability!

    There’s been a lot of lip service paid by vendors to the concept of scalability, but it often comes with a caveat. They want you to use their application programming interfaces (APIs) as the central unifying force across your technology architecture. This means that all other external and internal applications have to support them.

    What we've found from our strategy and product work is that there’s no silver bullet for implementing APIs and adopting a quick fix doesn’t address any underlying architectural deficiencies that may exist. Scalability itself should occur at the base level of your application infrastructure and is much more a design ethos rather than any defined architecture or solution.

    Here's how we define scalability when evaluating software solutions:

    • Extensible: Scalable software is extensible at the base level. The underlying design does not limit functionality and allows multiple avenues to tie into the underlying systems to enable extensions and other services. Amazon’s API Gateway is a good example that is publicly available.
    • Inherent in the architecture: Scalability must be built into the foundational stages of any API architecture. It cannot be added on later.
    • Includes demand balancing: Just as important as extensibility is responding to demand. Scalability implies that the handling of requests is done efficiently whether there are one hundred requests or one million.

    We are seeing more broker-dealers and RIA aggregators building part or all of their advisor and client user interfaces. This has become measurably more efficient and less costly as the breadth and depth of APIs has increased across almost every vendor. (See The Battle for the RIA Technology Integration Hub)

    Custody & Clearing General Session

    Raj Madan, Managing Director of Technology at Pershing and John Peluso, President of First Clearing came out firing double barrels of new technology and innovative ideas that their firms are working on to keep their firms in the race for RIA custody assets.

    I saw a proof of concept of this technology at the recent Pershing Insight Conference back in June (which was in Arizona, by the way. Hello Pershing event planning?) and I believe it will be the future for wealth management platform interfaces. Over the past ten years or so, these systems have become too darn complex! It's difficult navigate through the multiple layers of menus and screens to find the exact field, button or form that you need to solve a client issue. This generates a tremendous amount of inbound customer support requests, which are expensive to support. (See 14 of the Absolute Best Ideas From Pershing INSITE 2019)

    But with the chatbot, it's available 24/7 and can take you to exactly the right location in the system to solve your problem. Need a form because your client lost their credit card? No problem. Want to open a new account? Easy. Change a beneficiary? Child's play. This will also save time for new RIA staff who won't have to spend time in training before being able to use the platform. They can jump right in on day 1 and be productive. (See #ItzOnWealthTech Ep 23: How to Turn Competitors into Frenemies to Help Clients Succeed with Christina Townsend)

    BillfFin enterprise cloud-based billing enables broker-dealers to leverage the billing experience and enables customization at scale down to the individual advisor level, according to Seth Johnson, CEO of Redi2 Technologies. The Race to Zero by custodians is just one of the tectonic shifts impacting RIAs and forcing them to consider expanding the value-added services they offer clients.

    We have found that a major deficiency in most advisory firms' rollout of new technology is their advisor communications plan. Most companies don't even consider this or include it in their launch project. It is just as important to communicate the purpose and benefits of the new technology to the advisors as it is to deploy the technology itself. We recommend considering an internal marketing campaign designed to educate advisors and get their buy-in for the new tools. This always increases adoption rates as well as advisor satisfaction levels.

    How's Your Client Experience?

    The panelists for this session were:

    This is not always true. We work with many of the top broker-dealers and they all have advisor committees that do a pretty good job communicating their needs around technology. Some of our most successful strategy projects have been based on the feedback provided by these committees that consolidate the future state vision of the advisors.

    This is related to poor communication planning by the firm as part of the technology implementation. Advisors should be treated like clients when it comes to technology rollouts. Your marketing plan needs to be well thought out and funded as a strategic imperative. See my comments above.

    "Broken experiences" is the perfect way to describe a lot of interactions that clients and advisors have with their technology solutions. The first step is realizing and identifying that these broken experiences exist and the second is to define plans to address them. The third step is to execute these plans and digitized channels and delivery mechanisms have helped to expedite these projects.

    #1 Twitter Ranking

    Say what you want about me, but I sure know how to pump out the tweets at a conference!

    Disclosure: Michael Kitces is a co-founder of AdvicePay, which was mentioned in this article.

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