Gavin and Joel discuss how technology is allowing advisors to reach the mass market while also having a positive impact on high net worth individuals.

TRANSCRIPT

Moderator:
Suzanne Siracuse, CEO of Suzanne Siracuse Consulting

Panelists:
Oleg Tishkevich, CEO of INVENT.us
Joel Brukenstein, Founder of T3
Gavin Spitzner, President of Wealth Consulting Partners
Tim Welsh, President of Nexus Strategy

Suzanne: So, Gavin, keeping on the point of the evolution of adoption, integration, etc. One of the other trends we are hearing about is how do you match human expertise and digital experience to attract more clients and create the overall better client experience from Advisors to their Clients. You do a lot of work in this space, what are you seeing right now?

Gavin: Well, I’m glad you asked me this, Suzanne. It’s an area I’m very passionate about. It’s one of the positives that I see tech, really being a catalyst for offering the ability through, the automation of technology, to serve more clients and serve them better. For a long time, we’ve seen advisors all fighting over the same few million very wealthy clients. And now through technology, and a lot of the automation that’s available, I think we’re at this real turning point. You’re starting to see it with some of the robo advisors and hybrid advice solutions being able to go down market and service mass affluent and mass market with legitimate solutions that can help them achieve their financial objectives, whatever those are. And so, we’re seeing things around automation, marketing automation, to help fill the top of the funnel, help convert, onboard. And obviously the investment management, outsourcing automation, and all the way through to AI, whether that’s natural language processing, natural language generation, all types of tools, that free up capacity so that we can service a broader swath of clients, and really take advantage of what technology does better than humans. And allow humans to move up the value chain, and really focus their energy and effort around advising clients, coaching clients, and alike. So, I’m very focused on helping these firms drive advice-based client experiences. And so, another part of this is technology enabling that hybrid human and tech value proposition is sustaining planning as an ongoing event and a process versus a onetime upfront solution. So that’s drawing me personally to the types of solutions that are facilitating that ongoing engagement, facilitating next best action through artificial intelligence. So that where advisors do come into the frame, they can be more efficient to know who do I need to talk to about what in the in the manner that the client, any given client, wants to be engaged because everyone’s not the same. Some people want phone calls, some people want a text, some people want an email, some people want a Zoom, or they want to meet face to face once that’s available. So, using technology to understand ways that clients want to be engaged and on what topics, I think that’s where technology is playing a more and more important role.

Suzanne:  Yeah, I think for so long technology was positioned against the advisor, like this is they’re going to replace the advisor. And we are seeing this first-hand that it is a combination, right? Especially if advisors want to continue to scale their business and offer solutions, to your point, the mass affluent, right? And in order to do that, you really need to get more efficient. And in order to get more efficient, you need to adopt technology, right? It’s just kind of this is table stakes. Now you have to start thinking about it in this perspective. So instead of it being against each other, it’s how do you use them together? Right?

Joel: Yeah, and I think the most people think of it primarily as moving down market, because just the numbers, that’s where the dollars are. But make no mistake about it, it also impacts the high net worth, because they have much more complex situations, they probably have money and assets in many different places. And just keeping track of it all, you know, at a very high level and managing it, technology can really help there. And also, you know, when you’re doing more complex estate planning issues, for example, dealing with them, or even insurance issues, having artificial intelligence or the data at your fingertips can really impact the efficiency of what an advisor can do for a client. So, you know, my experience as an advisor is there’s almost never an instance where a client tells you every relevant fact that you probably need to know to do the best job for them. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s just because they don’t know what’s important. So as an advisor, having all the information at your fingertips, and having more options available to plan, can really make an impact for high net worth individuals as well, and they all draw on net worth.

Suzanne: Yep, great points. I think everybody needs to stop being apprehensive of AI and some of these other forward-looking solutions that are out there. That really, it’s about using it in conjunction with the advisor’s expertise.