The grandest prediction being made about financial adviser technology is that in the next few years, much of the industry's software will speak the same language.
"You're finally going to start seeing data moving between applications in a serious way," Greg Friedman, founder of Your Silver Bullet, predicted.
Your Silver Bullet is an industry consortium that is working toward voluntary software interoperability among its software company members. Mr. Friedman also is the president of CRM Software Inc., the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.-based purveyor of the Junxure customer relationship management application, and the president of the advisory firm Friedman & Associates in Novato, Calif.
"Don't get me wrong — it's not going to be a straight line. There are going to continue to be hurdles to overcome," Mr. Friedman said.
Integration and aggregation of client data will be a requirement to stay competitive in the next few years, said Greg Gardner, an adviser and the owner of The Gardner Group, a Dallas registered investment advisory firm with $50 million in assets under management. "It is frustrating to have to retype a new address into three to five systems; it's silly to not be able to accurately get all the account values" by entering them once, he said.
Some technologists think that more fundamental changes are on the way. "We are also going to see the development of a new breed of Internet technologies that are technically not "web-based," said Aaron Guidotti, chief executive of Big Brain Works LLC, headquartered in West Chester, Pa., and the man behind Grendel, an online information management system for advisers.
"These applications will natively have more integration with the user's operating system and will blur the line between local and Internet applications," he said.
Customized solutions predicated on new technologies will make getting the job done easier for advisers, said Suresh Kumar, chief information officer of clearing and custodial firm Pershing LLC of Jersey City, N.J.
"Purely from an infrastructure point of view, the extension of virtualization, mashups, Web 2.0 — all these various technologies that allow you to put together a fairly customized solution for a mass audience — are going to be important," he said.
In fact, enabling technologies will be instrumental to advisers who want to nurture their practices, said Darren Tedesco, director of business systems and strategic development at independent broker-dealer Commonwealth Financial Network of Waltham, Mass.
"Advisers are going to be able to offer a greater breadth of service in an even more collaborative fashion with their clients and get clients more actively involved," he said.
On the flip side, technology also enables clients to access information on the web, and that isn't good for advisers, said Rob Schmansky, an adviser and president of Sound Capital LLC of Detroit.
"Some advisers are spending a lot of time and money trying to keep ahead of the technology game, but successful advisers are going to have to find what their 'value-add' is when clients are able to access advice from multiple, personalized, high-level sources," he said.
E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].
