Advisor Technology

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Using Technology when Working from Home If your organization has implemented or is preparing to implement work from home (WFH) policies, technology can help you maintain close relationships with your clients and colleagues. Here are a few suggestions for how to keep your business on track.  Get comfortable with video chat. Since face-to-face meetings may be put on hold for a while, video conferencing can be a great solution. Whichever software you choose, be sure to test it before using it with a client, and know that you may need to invest a few minutes at the start of every meeting getting clients comfortable with the technology.  Keep your appointments (even with prospects). Especially given all that’s going on in the markets, clients need to know they can count on their advisor. Reach out well in advance of upcoming meetings to let them know that your organization has implemented WFH policy and provide the dial in information (preferably with video chat).  Don’t hide behind a blank screen. Even if your clients choose to have their camera turned off, yours should always be on so they can see your body language, know that you’re not distracted, and see your passion and commitment.  Match the communication format to the issue. For unscheduled conversations, consider the best communication format based on factors such as the sense of urgency or the complexity of the topic. Long email chains can be frustrating for everyone involved. Picking up the phone is often the speediest course of action, and having a video component can be helpful.  Make your presence known in group meetings. In group meetings, be sure you remain present and are actively listening to the discussion. Participating in meetings via video helps ensure you remain focused, allows you to raise your hand if you have a question, and helps others know you are engaged.  Create an environment at home that is conducive to work. Try to set up a quiet, dedicated workspace and consider how you'll take calls. Keep to your normal business schedule as much as possible. Shower, get dressed, and take a short walk to “commute” to the office before settling in for the day.  Minimize distractions. Distractions can be a major issue, so be ready to make adjustments to avoid them. If you have others in the house, talk about 'office etiquette' including when it is appropriate to interrupt, what it means when you have headphones on, etc.  Keep teamwork and collaboration alive. Allow for time for collaboration and relationship-building, even if you have to schedule it. Make full use of any collaborative tools you have access to. Google Docs, for example, are a great way to get clarity, gather input, and gain consensus without an in-person meeting.  Communicate more frequently with your team. Don’t ignore the need to keep in close contact with your team. Check in with one another at the beginning and end of each day so everyone knows when you're on- and offline. Being less visible to one another makes it even more important to keep each other in-the-know. Maintain a sense of transparency by discussing what you're doing, sharing your work-in-progress, and keeping everyone in the loop before they wonder how you’re spending your time. 

4 Signs That It’s Time to Adopt Investment Management Technology Today’s advisor technology offerings have the power to boost a firm’s efficiency, both in the front office and the back office. Financial services technologies are “hot”: Adoption of digital tools that simplify, support, and/or streamline money management has doubled just since 2015. But your advisory firm is probably doing okay without the latest technology... right? If your firm is hesitant (or just slow) to launch tools designed to increase efficiency, consider that the most successful advisors use more technology — and spend more on technology — to drive growth and scale. They understand its value in creating greater efficiencies and in creating a better overall client experience. Here are four signs your firm is ready to take advantage of technologies that can help improve how you do business: You spend less than half your time nurturing clients and prospects In this case, you may be among the majority of today’s financial advisors who wish they could spend more time with clients. Many advisors spend the majority of their time managing portfolios, doing administrative work, and other low-value activities. If that’s you, it may be time to find a solution that frees you up to spend your time building your business. Technology can take on everything from performance reporting and recordkeeping to portfolio management, transactions and trades, aggregation, account reconciliation, and more. You’re not acquiring assets fast enough It’s been shown that advisors who are enabled to spend more time with clients generally fare better than those who can’t: they have an annual growth rate higher than that of advisors whose time is focused on investment management. They also have more clients, greater annual asset growth rates, and greater annual revenue growth. In other words, technology makes it possible to remove repetitive, low-value work from advisors’ desks and give them more time to spend where it makes the biggest impact — with clients. If your business isn’t growing the way you’d like it to, it could be time to bring technology into the mix. You’re as bogged down with paper as you were five years ago Technologies that organize and store documents are making old-school systems — and the potentially costly errors that come with them — things of the past. Today’s technology makes it possible to optimize most processes within a firm, automating everything from workflows and reporting to compliance, client correspondence and statements, online transactions, account management, due diligence, trade confirmations, and more. Even the account opening process can be completely paperless. The impact of technology in optimizing a firm is significant: automation can help firms save up to 60% on time-to-resolution of repetitive tasks, with the added benefit of accuracy and reduced costs. Your HNW clients are asking for better digital capabilities Many high net worth clients, especially those under 40, are asking for (or, rather, demanding) digital capabilities to support their portfolio and relationship management needs. Finding a technology that offers an intuitive, convenient platform for them to engage with advisors should be evaluated as a priority for any firm eager to serve clients and ensure their long-term loyalty. Investors of all ages may want more technology applied to investing and, if used effectively, might actually increase clients’ trust in an advisor or firm.   Today’s advisor technology offerings have the power to boost a firm’s efficiency, both in the front office and the back office, and can relieve advisors and staff of activities that don’t directly contribute to growth. Taking a critical look at the amount of time being spent on low-value tasks and on your current growth trajectory could reveal a number of opportunities for improvement that can be solved by implementing the right digital solutions.

How Advisors Should Choose a Digital Partner Now more than ever, advisors rely on technology to serve their clients. Choosing the right digital partner is a challenge, but it shouldn’t be a headache. Follow our four-step evaluation process to help effectively vet your digital solutions. If choosing a technology platform for your advisory feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. According to the annual Brother Survey on small business technology (500 employees and less), 64% of business owners feel overwhelmed when it comes to shopping for technology solutions. And yet, technology has become a vital part of how every advisor does business. You use technology. Whether you're focused on improving client relationship management, back-office operations, client acquisition, tax optimization, or any other part of being an investment advisor, choosing the right technology is an important part of scaling how you operate. So, while vetting digital platforms may not be your favorite use of time, it’s at least important enough that you develop the confidence to choose a technology platform that will serve you well. In this guide, we aim to provide a step-by-step process of how to get from having a technology need to choosing a technology solution with as little pain and as much inspiration as possible. At Betterment, we are constantly vetting technology platforms and partnerships in the financial space. Think of this article as a collection of that wisdom—the best ideas from across the business as users and builders of technology. In the At Betterment, we are constantly vetting technology platforms and partnerships in the financial space. Think of this article as a collection of that wisdom—the best ideas from across the business as users and builders of technology. In the follow sections, we’ll explore: What you should consider before exploring for digital solutions How to settle on your business’ key priorities and objectives for a tech initiative How to sort through various digital tools available Why any tool should be measured by customer experience How to measure your digital partnership’s success in the future Advisor Prep Work Before Searching for a Digital Partner Before getting started searching for your technology needs, it’s important to get a lay of the land. One of the reasons we started Betterment for Advisors was that we saw a gap in the variety of tech available to advisors today. In particular, we felt that there was no digital platform that could simplify the rote, complicated tasks associated with custody and tax optimization while at the same time giving clients a top-notch digital experience. What immediately became clear as we developed our platform was that there are many providers selling a set of products that profess to help advisors “manage it all,” when in fact, they’ve only conquered a slice of what advisors could use to grow their business. In the advisory space, there is no all-in-one solution for every business need: custody, back-office management, tax efficiency tools, client portal, CRM, fee management, and marketing. Executing all of this well would be a lot for any one company. Right now, the landscape is limited, and while solutions like Betterment are working at growing the suite of features we offer, no one provider can offer everything. Knowing this can help you refine your search for a digital partner. If you can’t solve for all your needs at once, then that helps you make smarter choices about which needs to prioritize. For instance, is your biggest pain point today helping customers with fewer assets manage their money without occupying too much time, or does client acquisition and marketing keep you up at night? Do you need a great online client experience, or is your challenge in revenue management and fees? These questions are the key thoughts to discuss with your team before starting a search. From there, you’ll want to prioritize all these challenges and create key objectives for what your technology partnerships should achieve. That’s our first step. 1. Identify your priorities and key objectives. When you start by asking yourself which challenges have the most impact on your business, you begin to develop a framework for your technology priorities. From our perspective, the best way to prioritize the technology features you need is to write out your key objectives for meeting current challenges. Define what outcomes you want to achieve by adding in a digital platform. Once you have a well-articulated list, you can put them in rank order, prioritizing from top to bottom. This process forces you to assess which challenges will have the biggest business impact, setting up a list of criteria, against which you can evaluate various solutions. 2. Differentiate overall business technology needs from advisor-specific needs. Once you’ve identified your list of priorities, we recommend taking a step back to evaluate the range of tools at your disposal. In surveying the tools used most by advisors, we’ve found that there’s a fairly prominent divide in the products offered today. In some cases, advisors use general business administration products—CRM, marketing automation, accounting software, etc. In other cases, advisors use a range of solutions specifically designed for financial advisors: products and services for custodianship, portfolio management, client access, and handling transactions. There are also platforms that combine functionalities—for instance, one advisory tool might offer a core service for servicing client accounts while featuring some CRM capabilities. It’s important to vet whether these multi-functional platforms constitute a robust, fully-baked set of tools or whether each tool included is a limited version of what you could buy as a standalone product. For core financial functions, such as portfolio management, you likely want the expertise of a tool built specifically for your industry. However, for other business functions, such as marketing or website management, it can be to your advantage to vet advisor-specific tools against broader, mass-market platforms. 3. Solve for your clients first. Too many advisors try to solve their business needs at the expense of their clients’ experience. Whether you're considering a subscription service, a one-off software purchase, or a business partnership (such as Betterment for Advisors), always put your ability to service clients first. If you consider the state of most small-to-medium advisors, most advisors do not have the large marketing or customer service teams characteristic of their larger competitors. And yet, through digital solutions, advisors can often greatly enhance their client service capabilities. The key is to prioritize client experience as a major criterion for evaluating digital solutions. For instance, when choosing between a robust customer portal and a best-in-class CRM tool, it might be worthwhile to weight the direct impact on customers more heavily than solving internal process needs. In general, elements of customer experience like a digital log-in are becoming increasingly important to customers. Advisory consultant Michael Kitces asks the challenging question of whether client portals should be built around client vaults, planning software, or portfolio reporting—what he calls the “big three” advisor software categories. Our approach to answering this question begins with centering client experience as the main criterium for any of the tools you consider for your advisory business. If you solve for your clients’ needs first, you’re likely to find that other issues, such as the need for additional client acquisition tools, become less pertinent over time. 4. Buy for future scale and business needs As you assess digital partnerships, it’s important to make your investment in a solution that promises scale and adaptability as the future changes. Consider what the digital partner offers in terms of ongoing development or integration with other platforms. Also, evaluate how your business needs will change as you grow. For advisors especially, a digital partnership should be understood as a five-year (or more) arrangement; the solution should be adaptable for all the change that could occur in a long-term period. For instance, if you double the number of advisors on staff, how effective will the platform continue to be? If new investment vehicles enter the market, how will the platform handle the change? While it’s important to use appropriate software for the scale and shape of your business, it’s important to have enough flexibility to grow. Businesses face enough challenges when taking on new client loads and growing rapidly; you don’t want your digital partnership to hold you back. What are your options as a financial advisor today? The four points above should help you carefully evaluate and select the right digital partners and software solutions for your advisory business. Start by surveying the field, understanding what the options are like and identifying your key priorities and objectives. Then, differentiate the business needs you’re trying to solve for. The key to any digital partner search is keeping your focus on client service. And if you buy for future scale and business adaptability, you’ll likely make a great choice. To get started with your search of great digital partners, we encourage you to do a broad sweep of the field. But as a first glance, take a look at our offering at Betterment for Advisors. While we aren’t your CRM or accounting software, we do offer a robust, white-labeled platform for portfolio management, automatic tax optimization, and other back-office operations—with a goal of having the best client portal experience on the market.

Help Your Clients See All of Their Wealth in One Place Now when your clients sync their outside accounts with Betterment for Advisors, you can see details about all of their investments, including fund allocations, holdings, fees, and cash. Your clients can now see all of their wealth in one place. Securely syncing outside investment and debt accounts, such as 401(k)s, IRAs, taxable accounts, mortgages, and loans held at other institutions, helps give you added insight into your client’s total wealth. Now, right from the Betterment for Advisors website, your clients will be able to see their portfolio allocations, holdings, and shares from various providers, as well as assets and debt. Betterment for Advisors’s aggregation technology summarizes fund fees and cash holdings so you can better manage your clients’ investment strategy. Outside accounts can also be factored into a tax-coordinated retirement goal, so their retirement plan is always on track. As a co-fiduciary, we will only use data to help you give better financial advice and more clarity into your clients’ investments. Your clients’ privacy comes first. We strive to exceed the strictest standards for protecting account and financial data. Syncing a financial account creates a secure, read-only connection with other financial institutions, and we never store their log-in information, nor share, sell or trade their synced data. What do we show you and your clients? Securities holdings, shares, and current value within each outside portfolio. Look-through allocation summary of each portfolio, using Xignite’s Morningstar data. Fees for mutual funds and ETFs. Cash holdings including currencies and money market funds. Liabilities, including mortgages, credit card debt, and loans. Other assets such as real estate can be manually added for a more complete view of total net worth. Betterment for Advisors supports over 13,000 institutions and most accounts sync in under one minute. Synced account data is updated automatically every day. Each of your clients’ accounts is visible on the Summary tab right in their Betterment for Advisors account, and portfolio details are available on the Portfolio tab. On the Portfolio tab, you and your clients can see what securities are held and how each of those accounts is allocated across various asset classes. Get started now by encouraging your clients to sync their accounts securely. Clients can add or manage synced accounts from the Summary tab in the External Accounts section by clicking Sync New or Manage.