Executive Summary
As many elements of the traditional wealth management business become commoditized, advisors and their firms are seeking more effective ways to add value and stand out in an increasingly competitive environment. Providing personalized advice efficiently — in ways that meet the needs of ever more demanding clients and prospects — is becoming the proven route to business success.
This paper will focus on how technology is playing a vital role in driving future success of the wealth management business and how it can empower firms and advisors to succeed by employing the winning strategies of the industry's top performers. It will outline how the fastest-growing and most productive firms in the advice business are leveraging technology and practice management strategies to build more efficient and profitable practices. The guide will then summarize the key back-office and front-end tools being used most by these top-performing firms to improve workflows, processes and business operations. Finally, it will highlight how new technologies are changing the ways in which advisors work and outline next steps for advisors and firms who want to take their business to the next level.
How top-performing firms use Technology
Because top-performing firms place a higher emphasis on organizational efficiency than other wealth management firms, they typically employ technology more extensively to rationalize, streamline and process workflows than do other firms that have neither systematized nor automated their work.
Over the years that
InvestmentNews Research has been tracking technology use among firms, the average number of software products used by respondents has risen. Currently, it stands at just under 6 products, on average, compared with 4.8 in 2015 and 4.2 in 2013.
As might be expected, firms with greater revenue tend to use more software products than smaller firms. Where firms with less than $250,000 in revenue used an average of 4.3 software products, firms that generated between $10 million and $15 million in revenue in 2016 used 6.4 technology products — the highest rate among all firms.
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