This is the first in a blog series on Skience’s integrations with Clearing and Custodial firms. You can read about our integration with Pershing and Schwab.
As an advisor, you work hard to create a personable experience for your clients. You remember their birthdays, ask about grandkids, and enjoy chatting over a cup of coffee. Your clients come to you because you make them feel heard and well taken care of. They know they’re not just another number on a spreadsheet.
But when it comes to creating a seamless experience for new clients, automation can actually be a good thing.
Integrating your custodian, like Fidelity, with the rest of your financial tech stack saves you (and your clients) the time and energy of opening accounts manually.
Why the Client Onboarding Experience Matters
By the time you start the onboarding process with a new client, they already have a good sense of who you are as a person. But once the paperwork begins, it’s your time to prove who you are as an advisor.
Clients need to see that you’re organized, and they want to get things done with as little effort as possible — while knowing their information is safe.
Skience offers a guided digital workflow that leads advisors and their clients through the process of opening a new account with Fidelity Clearing and Custody. The experience is further enhanced by integrations with Quik!® for forms automation and prefill capabilities that saves advisors from unnecessary rekeying while clients experience the convenience of a single eSignature experience through DocuSign®.
Thanks to these integrations, advisors have the ability to stay organized and impress clients with a simplified experience. No more back and forth, multiple signatures, or lost docs. Skience automatically stores everything in one place and helps keep advisors informed of where their clients are in the account opening process.
New Account Opening and Maintenance at Fidelity
Skience’s API-based account opening process allows advisors to open multiple Fidelity accounts at once. Designed with rules-based supervision, the advisor can easily identify missing or incorrect information and complete the process in minutes. Utilizing automated prefilling of client data from Salesforce, it reduces the chance of error while eliminating the need for advisors to enter data from multiple households manually.
For firms that prefer to use Fidelity’s Wealthscape platform to open accounts, advisors can use Skience’s guided workflows to launch and prefill information directly into the Wealthscape platform and continue the account opening process.
Once a new account has been created, advisors can benefit from Skience’s daily posting of Fidelity accounts, positions, balances, and transactions that seed the contact and account records in the CRM – providing a 360-degree client view and to support reporting. Additionally, advisors can use Skience’s API-based account updates to service accounts directly from the Skience platform.
In an effort to make it easy for users to access their accounts, Skience also provides a single sign-on experience with contextual links to Fidelity’s Integrated Cashiering Platform, Service Center, Statements, Reporting, and other popular features.
How Skience and Fidelity Work Together
Aside from creating a seamless onboarding experience for clients, Skience helps advisors stay organized and compliant when opening new Fidelity accounts and storing client information.
Gone are the days of file cabinets stuffed full of paperwork or manila folders piled high on your desk. Skience Safe’s configurable indexing and auto-sweep of account openings creates a document storage solution with no manual assistance needed. All account data is stored in a singular, secure location.
Compliance teams can benefit from automating the due diligence process with Skience’s integration with EVS to perform OFAC/CIP checks in real time.
At every step of the way, you know exactly where each account stands and what needs to be done to complete the onboarding process. This enables you to keep clients informed of their progress, without letting anything slip through the cracks.
Why Automating Is Important
How many new client accounts do you help open every year?
Skience assists advisors in opening new Fidelity accounts while reducing Not in Good Order (NIGO) transactions, enforcing compliant processes, and enabling rules-based supervision.
Every time you work with a client to open a new Fidelity account, the process and results are a direct reflection of your ability to provide a great customer experience. Your clients are working with you to help make their financial lives easier, and that starts with the onboarding process.
Automating what you can to create a streamlined and secure process actually gives you more time to focus on the personal aspects of your business. Calling interested prospects, checking in on current clients, and answering questions about accounts quickly are all ways to affirm your commitment to creating a positive experience.
Skience + Fidelity
Account aggregation is no longer a dream of advisors, it’s a reality that’s here to stay. Skience helps advisors automate the account opening process by integrating prefilled data from Salesforce, storing all relevant information in one place, and making the eSignature process simple for clients.
The purpose of this API-driven integration between Skience and Fidelity is to essentially digitize real-life wealth management interactions. By streamlining the steps, Skience helps greatly reduce the likelihood of errors in rekeying or duplication.
Spanned across multiple accounts opened throughout the year, this creates significant time savings for advisors.
Interested in learning more about how Skience simplifies your relationship with custodians?
Check out our Skience Fair series hosted by some of Skience’s top thought leaders, or get in touch to book a demo today.