Modern investors are demanding a wealth management experience from financial institutions that don’t include hours of pen to paper and lots of hand cramps. In turn, your advisors desperately want and need a modern, secure cloud-based solution for client document storage to help facilitate a paperless experience.
Modern document storage can mean a lot of things. No more trekking to file cabinets stored in a back room. No more rekeying information a half dozen times into different software applications. No more wondering if your electronic storage is safe, secure, and compliant. But what document storage really needs to be is simple and integrated.
You’ve likely already put together a wealthtech stack of solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), trading and rebalancing, financial planning, and electronic document signing. But without a plan to connect it all, that kind of tech stack can complicate document management, not help it. Your advisors are constantly wading (and maybe even drowning) in client data, forms, notes, and more — even the electronic variety.
Let’s break down exactly how your firm can simplify document management processes and get all your workflows and requirements in sync.
Old Document Storage
When we talk about “old” storage, this time, we don’t mean file cabinets — we’re talking about the inefficient and mostly just confusing management systems many companies resort to, such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, your network drive, and your advisor’s local PC desktop and folder. (Trust me, you don’t want to look at their desktops.)
These systems all require everyone to remember where a file is stored, how to share it, and how to upload new ones. Plus, they rely on everyone remembering to use the same process and naming convention. In the end, they end up being too complex, unintuitive, and mostly uncustomizable.
No one wants to use them (or can’t figure out how), so they end up making up their own system. This system is often never shared with anyone else, so an advisor transition can be a nightmare. They likely would make your compliance officer cringe, cry, or quit.
Remember, these systems were not built with advisory firms in mind. They’re a siloed program that requires either intricate work from your IT department or lots of repeated, manual work to share data with the other tech in your stack.
Modernized Document Management
Instead, your advisors and your firm as a whole need an integrated, modernized document management system that is as efficient and easy to use as it is secure and compliant. This all starts with implementing workflows to standardize and speed up everyday processes, including these top three common scenarios:
- Notes and attachments: Advisors will never get the chance to forget to attach a client note with automatic uploading of notes and attachments from the CRM, including Salesforce.
- Financial account information: Never download and upload ad nauseam again. Financial documents from digital signature programs, such as DocuSign, can be automatically indexed with event-based and automated storage rules.
- Household documents: No more having to mess with links or copying from one system to another. Household documents from managed account programs, like Envestnet, can be automatically stored with event-triggered or time-triggered workflows.
In addition to efficiency, these workflows also give you peace of mind that all of your bases are covered, and everything is organized how it should be, including adhering to compliance and SEC Rule 17a-4.
Plus, sharing sensitive financial information between people and systems inside and outside your firm can be done securely. Advisors can customize sharing with permissions and time windows to ensure private information stays as private as it should.
Skience Safe
Skience Safe offers everything a modern document management solution should have and, at the same time, delivers significant operational efficiencies and cost savings, including improved efficiency for new account opening and maintenance.
After all, your Operations Team needs to be able to leverage technology to drive scale and reduce the total cost of ownership.
Storing and sharing sensitive information is essential to providing a robust planning experience for clients. So advisors want—and need to compete in a crowded wealth management industry—an integrated solution where they can see financial account data along with any paperwork submitted by clients or third parties in order to establish and maintain the financial account.
Skience Safe seamlessly integrates the paperwork with account data to give advisors complete visibility into the financial account activity. Again, no more file cabinets or logging into multiple systems to download and upload. With Skience Safe, advisors have logical, easy-to-use navigation between financial accounts, Salesforce accounts and contacts, and Salesforce households.
Looking at the bigger picture, it can sometimes be hard for firms to provide the best digital experience for their employees, advisors, and clients at the same time. But Skience Safe provides the ability to all of those groups to create a personalized digital workspace experience that is tailored to their unique needs and wants.