Fidelity updates Wealthscape with paperless account opening

Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions is the latest custodian to bring paperless account opening to financial advisers.

The update to Wealthscape, Fidelity’s technology platform for advisers, enables advisers to digitally open and fund a new individual brokerage account and authorize asset movement. Clients can see a snapshot of the data and disclosures relevant to the transaction.

The new account onboarding experience will reduce the number of pages needed to open an account by 75%, according to Fidelity. Advisers can also search for, retrieve and pre-populate data from Fidelity’s books and records.

Advisers can bundle together multiple transactions and send a single authorization email to clients. Fidelity is also supporting authentication via mobile devices and text messages.

The result will be faster authorization for investors and a simplified verification process for advisers, saving time and reducing the opportunities for errors, said Lisa Burns, Fidelity Institutional head of platform technology.

“Adding technology that saves advisers time to our existing digital capabilities is a top priority for us because it helps them focus more on building deeper relationships with clients,” Ms. Burns said in a statement. “Time is the most valuable commodity advisors have, and more than half of advisors we surveyed said they lose out on valuable client face time because of account opening paperwork, so we completely digitized the onboarding experience to give advisors, home offices and investors a more efficient way to handle many of their everyday tasks.”

Instead of next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence or blockchain, custodians and broker-dealers are increasingly turning their attention toward improving more fundamental parts of the financial advisers’ jobs.

Andrew Salesky, senior vice president of digital adviser solutions at Schwab Advisor Services, recently said digital onboarding is the largest investment the company is making in technology. TD Ameritrade Institutional, which Schwab is attempting to acquire, has also been pushing toward fully digital account opening.

[More: Next-gen portfolio management tool from Schwab is now live]

In December, LPL Financial also introduced a new account opening tool it says saves advisers time by reducing the number of fields they have to fill out and pre-populating forms with client data.

When James Crowley took over as CEO of BNY Mellon Pershing in July, he made improving adviser technology a top priority, including a streamlining of the client onboarding process.

Driving the movement is advisers' demand for a modern online investing experience similar to what customers are accustomed to in other areas of their lives and to what financial technology startups are already delivering.

“We understand our clients are looking for a simplified interface that more closely mirrors what they’d see as a retail customer across all aspects of their lives, not just financial services, and we’re committed to delivering that,” Ms. Burns said.

Fidelity is beginning the rollout of the digital onboarding feature Monday. The custodian is planning several other updates to Wealthscape this year, including support for more account registration types and a refreshed user experience.