For decades, wealth firms and advisors built their businesses around the mission of maximizing returns, the wisdom of staying in the markets, and why investing for the future is, by and large, a job that should be left to the professionals.

There's plenty of truth to all those. But for Zachary Conway, the traditional hyperfixation on portfolio strategy and market performance takes away from what could be advisors' greatest strength.

"An advisor's value around investment management was never about beating the market, or having special access to investment products that other people don't have access to," Conway, founder and CEO of fintech startup Seeds told InvestmentNews. "Those things were never true since the beginning of the industry, and really, advisors have always known that."

Conway, who's also a managing director and financial advisor at Parsipanny, New Jersey-based Conway Wealth, believes the tide is starting to turn. Even with the continued popularity of robo-advisors and self-directed investing, he's seeing an increased demand for human-led advice across the board, particularly as investors look for deeper and more meaningful discussions about their wealth.

"Even among [those with] an existing aging client base, those expectations of personalization continue to rise. But that is also the fundamental expectation of next-gen investors, older millennials and below, [that] everything should be curated to who I am and what's important to me."

Efficiency over experience

Painting with broad strokes, Conway says technology in the wealth space has predominantly been focused on operational efficiency and scalability at the expense of client experience. He argues that solutions across every category, from financial planning to CRM, TAMPs, legacy trading platforms, and portfolio management tools have been designed to make advisors more efficient, but haven't done as good a job at helping them tell "personalized investment management stories."

"Many of those different pieces were really designed for the efficiency, the button-clicking, the streamlining of an advisor's workflow," he says. "Those systems didn't enable advisors to get that deeper information about an investor. You would get a risk tolerance score, but you only get cursory information about the investor ... there's nothing to personalize on the other side of that, other than the asset allocation."

According to Conway, Seeds is working to address that gap. While the technology maintains a focus on making advisors' day-to-day portfolio operations easier, he says it's more centered on making the customers' experience deeper, more compelling, and more individualized.

That message appears to be hitting home: Last month, the firm announced the successful completion of a $10 million Series A funding round led by Portage. which also figured in a November $15 million financing round for Boosted.ai, which helps portfolio managers integrate quantitative techniques into their processes

AI has entered the chat

While Conway acknowledged the rising influence of artificial intelligence among advisors and wealth firms, he believes AI innovation so far has broadly hit the same beats as traditional technology – solving more for advisor efficiency and less on their ability to offer human and personalized experiences.

That bears out somewhat in a recent AI survey conducted by F2 Strategy, which looked at how different segments of financial services currently use AI. According to that research, advisors have been using AI for notetaking and meeting preparation, alternatives data processing, and delivering compliant messages to their clients.

"Advisors are really good at asking questions. When they do holistic financial planning and go through a discovery process, they ask a lot about their clients' hopes, dreams, aspirations," Conway says, "When advisors shift the conversation to talk about the portfolio itself, they go the other way. They start to tell a story about themselves, how they manage money, what products they use, how their models are built." 

The rallying cry at Seeds, he says, is also for advisors to embrace AI. But rather than becoming more robotic or calculating, he encourages them to use it in a more human way, getting to know their clients better and manage their portfolios more meaningfully.

Conway shared how one advisor used to focus his client meetings on the economy, their outlook for the markets, the portfolio's performance, and some planning items. But with deeper insights about the clients' investing interests, he spent the most recent review meeting talking about AI, crypto, and other up-and-coming themes.

"They didn't talk about performance at all, and they didn't really talk about the broad economy at all, because that's not what the client really cared to talk about," Conway says. 

"If an advisor has a platform to capture more interesting, deeper information about a customer – their values, specifics about their goals, how interested they are in emerging investing trends, and how much detail do they care to understand about portfolio metrics – then that can tie to more personalized portfolio conversations and outcomes," he says.