Do You Know the Growth Formula for Advisors?

If you’re a growth-minded advisor, one of the most effective ways to grow your business is to leverage your technology stack to automate your work and engage in deeper, more frequent conversations with clients. 

It might have once been a luxury, but leveraging technology is now a necessity for advisory firms. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new standards and introduced the adoption of more technology and tools than in any year prior. 

In a recent Skience Fair session, Skience CEO Sanjeev Kumar talked with Kerry Ryan, CPWA®, Director of Global Go-to-Market for Wealth and Asset Management at Salesforce, to look at how advisors can use their technology to meet the needs of their clients. 

Here are some of the best moments. 

Best Practices for Digital Transformation 

Kerry Ryan

The transition to virtual work has gone well, and we’ve seen customers realizing the value of their digital investments. 

Advisors are repositioning themselves as the trusted life advisor and life coach for clients instead of being seen only for their investment capabilities. It’s an exciting time for advisors to show their value in more meaningful ways. 

One way advisors are offering meaningful value is by rethinking customer acquisition. The transition to digital meetings has been good for existing relationships. Still, growing advisors also have to think about how they can use their technology to target new relationships and bring those people into their firm as well. 

Sanjeev Kumar

We are seeing advisors increasingly looking for solutions that speak with other best-of-breed integrations. There’s not much of an appetite anymore for the siloed, “we do it all” approach to technology. 

Another observation I would point out is the impact of business process automation on an advisor’s workday. From simple things like scheduling an annual review to more complex interactions like account opening and maintenance, technology can provide a big assist here.

3 Product Capabilities Advisors Should Prioritize

Kerry Ryan

Advisors want technology that is easy to use. We follow three key principles for all the products we develop:

• Simplicity: We look for ways to deliver a great experience not only for advisors but also ways to help them create a compelling client experience.
• Integrated: We don’t want advisors to have to “swivel chair” between apps to get work done.
• Empathy: We want to be user-centric in everything we do and intentionally consider the advisors who use our product at every turn.

 

Increasing Operational Efficiency

Kerry Ryan

What happened when advisors moved out of the office was that they saw the real challenges of not having an effective onboarding experience.

You want a painless process, and you don’t want to ask advisors or clients for the same information multiple times. 

For an advisor to grow their business, they have to spend more of their time on high-value activities. They need technology that can help them scale onboarding, which is a complicated multi-step process. 

Sanjeev Kumar

Growth-minded advisors define their processes. When they do that, they can manage their data from an operational standpoint and capture it once — but use it multiple times. Once captured, data can be used to open new accounts, create reports, even send birthday cards.

Advisors have to embrace a digital lifestyle now because of COVID, and end-to-end integrations are also key. It’s not best practice to think about digitizing paperwork as just adding an eSignature solution but then keying in the data again later in a different system. It all has to work together. 

Customer and Advisor Collaboration Trends

Kerry Ryan

It’s fascinating how accelerated video conferencing has become. The use of voice has also accelerated. Merrill Lynch, in particular, called out the massive improvement in the adoption of their voice capabilities.

We’re also seeing a rise in chatbots. Clients want quick answers, and they want to be in the driver’s seat. Chatbots help advisors to provide more content and resources for all things financial. 

The struggle is in keeping up with customer demands that are influenced by Amazon, Google, and Uber. Those are the digital experiences advisors have to consider. 

In the past, relationships were more formal and followed a set schedule. Now there is more interest in frequent check-ins and the ability to review a client’s full financial life. 

The Growth Formula for Advisors: Financial Services Cloud and Digital Wealth in a Box

Kerry Ryan

The benefit of Financial Services Cloud is that it was built specifically for the wealth management industry, based on real feedback. We continue to update it based on that feedback. 

Advisors can map out relationships in a very actionable way so they can understand family dynamics at a deep level. This type of depth and understanding can help to future proof a practice. It allows advisors to address any new life situations that might come up proactively. 

Sanjeev Kumar

At Skience, we created a bundle of our platform with Financial Services Cloud that was built specifically for growth-minded advisors. 

It provides all the abilities we talked about today, and it’s been designed to be easy to get, easy to deploy, and easy to use. 

It comes with a network of pre-selected integration partners, data management solutions, data aggregation, and custodial integrations for paperless onboarding and eSignatures.

Kerry Ryan

Advisory firms of all sizes need a strong technology foundation, but smaller wealth management firms especially are looking to ramp up their technology. 

Digital Wealth in a Box is a turnkey solution to run a practice successfully. Best of all, it grows with a firm. You can start small and then leverage more technology as you grow because you have the partnership with Salesforce and Skience to do that. 

Many organizations get technology challenged because they over-scope their tech stack, so they aren’t well-positioned to deliver value consistently. 

Digital Wealth in a Box gives you what you need now with access to what you’ll need later to help you drive meaningful value at any point in your firm’s growth.

Watch Kerry and Sanjeev’s discussion in full to get all their insights into how technology can support growing advisory firms. 

Watch the full session here.