Financial institutions have yet another option to digitally connect financial advisers with investors looking for advice.
Fintech company InvestCloud has a new application called Find My Advisor that will deliver retail investors a curated list of compatible financial advisers based on the investors' answers to a questionnaire asking about such topics as current assets, future goals, personal interests and a desire to meet in-person or virtually. Find My Advisor was developed in partnership with Huntington National Bank. a Columbus, Ohio-based regional bank with $179 billion in assets, and will power Huntington’s own digital client matching service, Advisor Connect.
Using application programming interfaces, or APIs, other financial institutions can use Find My Advisor to roll out a matchmaking service with their own branding.
“Developing empathy with a client for effective communication and planning — either in person or digitally — is a must for any wealth manager,” Will Bailey, chief strategy officer at InvestCloud, said in a statement. “So being able to connect the right client to the right advisor is essential for long-term, multi-generational retention."
While Find My Advisor is unique in that it provides the APIs for firms to offer their own matchmaking service, it joins an increasingly crowded field of digital client-adviser matching services. Startups like Harness Wealth, Lasso, Wealthramp and Zoe Financial all offer ways for prospects to search for and find a financial adviser, as do networks of registered investment advisers, such as XY Planning Network.
Some financial institutions have built their own, such as Edward Jones' in 2020 or Merrill Wealth Management’s recently launched Advisor Match tool.
While making it easier for investors to connect with a financial adviser is a noble goal, the proliferation of these services might be self-defeating. If every firm has a digital service to match advisers with clients, it will be just as difficult for advisers to differentiate themselves as it was before these services existed, leaving investors back at square one.
“In fact, the irony is that even as some adviser search tools try to give consumers more ways to distinguish among advisers — e.g., by choosing various topical specialties like retirement planning, estate planning or charitable planning — 'comprehensive' advisers tend to check all the boxes (in the hopes of getting a chance at every client), so that consumers likely end up overwhelmed with an indistinguishable number of choices and still can’t figure out how to winnow down the list of whom to work with,” XY Planning co-founder Michael Kitces wrote in InvestmentNews in 2020. “Or stated more simply, it’s difficult for consumers to differentiate among advisers who aren’t even willing to differentiate among themselves!”
InvestCloud declined to comment.
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