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February 03, 2022 at 01:37 PM
What You Need to Know
- “This looks like a pretty extensive overhaul in terms of usability and personalization,” consultant Tim Welsh says.
- The new digital empowerment tool was piloted with some large RIAs, BDs and multi-family offices.
- The analytics upgrades are significant, and customizable homepages will benefit advisors, Joel Bruckenstein says.
Fidelity Institutional announced major updates to its technology offerings on Thursday that include enhancements to its Wealthscape advisor tech platform and a new digital empowerment tool that gives insight into firms’ digital strategies and adoption.
“This looks like a pretty extensive overhaul in terms of usability and personalization, so kudos to Fidelity for continuing to invest in the platform,” Tim Welsh, president of Nexus Strategy, told ThinkAdvisor.
The empowerment tool is “something new and should spark some good thinking inside of RIA firms as to their tech strategy going forward,” he said.
The tool provides an assessment of how well an advisory firm is leveraging tech. It has been piloted, starting in late 2021, with “roughly a dozen RIAs, broker-dealers, and multi-family offices, ranging from smaller RIAs to large, national firms, so that we could understand the range of needs that exist in the market, as well as the existing technologies and digital strategies within those firms,” according to Tricia Haskins, head of Integration Solutions at Fidelity Investments.
“Feedback has been positive, and client feedback throughout the course of the pilot helped shape the questions and content we included” in the digital empowerment tool, she told ThinkAdvisor.
“The tool is now available for all financial services firms, including RIAs, broker-dealers, family offices, and banks,” she said. It can be accessed on Fidelity Institutional’s clearing site.
The tool prompts firms to consider how their tech strategy, design and activation are empowering their businesses. Fidelity is also providing additional resources to “spark conversations with firms on what it means to be digitally empowered, how to enhance their technology ecosystem through thoughtful design, and more,” it said.
The enhancements also include updates to Integration Xchange, Fidelity’s open-architecture digital store, and the addition of Wealthscape Analytics, which it said was developed to highlight new opportunities for advisors to boost revenue and grow their businesses.
Recent updates to the platform included the addition of fractional share trading to Wealthscape, announced in September.
Analytics Boost
The digital empowerment tool is “new to Fidelity, but I think other custodians have done this before,” Joel Bruckenstein, Technology Tools for Today (T3) head, told ThinkAdvisor.
