By Jacob Rouser
Whether you’re a solopreneur advisor, a nationally known RIA, or an independent broker-dealer in the Southwest, you’re all connected by one thing:
Your client experience needs to be digital.
This isn’t breaking news. You’ve likely been told to improve your client experience or to transform your firm’s digital presence a dozen times in the last several weeks alone.
What you may not know, though is, that a digital client experience should do more than simply result in a prettier website or the ability to access forms in a portal.
Today’s client experiences have to be built to create strong relationships between advisors and clients by encouraging them to work together to finish tasks faster and with less back and forth.
We’ll look at how you should think about digital enablement in your firm as you look for which methods will make your account transition process for both advisors and investors.
Guiding Clients to Easier Interactions
Digital enablement makes common tasks faster and easier for end clients to complete. As your advisors interact with their clients, they’ll necessarily need to have those clients take action at times. Usually, that’s in the case of providing information or signing forms to open accounts.
The first step of digital enablement was to put forms online so clients could download what they needed instead of receiving paper forms in the mail. The client still might have printed the forms, but they were at least more accessible.
The second step of digital enablement put forms on those digital copies so a client could easily complete only the forms they needed to be responsible for, and keep their copies on their computer.
Today, digital enablement means giving the client everything they need in an online experience through technology. By providing an experience where the forms have been turned into a simple user interface, your team removes paper and mailing costs and also removes confusion for clients.
Through a guided account workflow like the one delivered by the Advisor Transitions solution, clients see only what they need to see and can complete their assigned tasks quickly and without confusion.
As big of a benefit as digital enablement can be for clients, it’s also a massive benefit for their advisors. It presents them as digitally-capable, trusted guides who add simplicity instead of complexity.+
Enabling Advisors to Do More, More Quickly
As good as it is for advisors to look better in the eyes of their clients, they still need to have the tools available to themselves to finish off the second half of those client tasks.
Again, understanding the modern expectations for how to digitally enable your advisors is critical here.
The first step of digital enablement was when advisors received those completed forms back from clients. They could finish filling them out on their computer, and then upload them to their custodian.
Many advisors still operate this way. But there are now better solutions that can help advisors improve productivity and finish transitioning accounts and clients faster.
Again, it takes the form of a full end-to-end software experience. Instead of asking advisors to upload documents on their own, which could result in a missed document and a frustrating NIGO or other error, you can now guide advisors every step of the way.
Where straight-through processing revolutionized the speed of trading, straight-through new account opening is doing the same for advisors.
Every piece of information an advisor needs to open an account can be seen and updated in their Advisor Transitions login and the entire package can be uploaded to a custodian—now downloading of forms required.
Fast, easy, and all online. That’s what digital enablement should look like for today’s wealth management organizations.
Benefitting the Entire Organization
Equipping advisors with the resources and tools they need to serve clients well is one of the visible ways a digital experience can improve an organization, but the benefits don’t end there.
Enhancing the Back Office
The entire enterprise operation stands to improve from digital enablement, starting with the all-important team members in the front and back office. Though often unseen by investors, back office teams often make up the engine that keeps wealth management firms humming. While an advisor is the face of the company, other team members are tasked with the day-to-day tasks of entering information and making sure accounts transition without a hitch.
In a truly digital environment, efficiency between the front and back office can be increased by reducing the need for back-and-forth communication between an advisor and who’s handling paperwork management. Fewer NIGOs and less time spent manually rekeying client information translates to more productivity for everyone.
Tracking ROI
With a solution like Skience’s Advisor Transitions platform, organizations can easily track the ROI associated with new advisory teams. At-a-glance views and dashboards provide executives with total oversight and transparency into how quickly account transfers are happening, and where slowdowns might occur in the process.
With these types of summary views, firms can make smart decisions about where to prioritize resources and keep operations moving.
Connecting to the Broader Ecosystem
The average wealth management organization uses multiple technology solutions to get the job done. Connecting with the broad ecosystems of applications and vendors used by a firm is a critical part of creating a robust technology experience that can’t be overlooked.
For a broker dealer, integration might mean retrieving data from custodial sources, syncing that data to a managed accounts platform to generate proposals, and then again sharing the data to a financial planning system for long-term client goals.
With integrations, each step in that process can be completed seamlessly—and it can be further simplified when those connections all route into a single, central hub.
Improving the Client Experience with Advisor Technology
Two-thirds of wealth management surveyed indicated that their primary objective is to improve their client experience.
Are you one of them?
You can begin by digitally enabling your advisors with the tools they need to create a client experience that enables stronger connections by creating painless, and even enjoyable, experiences for investors.
The Advisor Transitions platform from Skience puts everything your advisors need at their fingertips in one place. They can keep track of client information, track each stage of the account transition process, and give clients an online-only process for moving their accounts.