The Current Wealth Advisor Experience – Constant Seams

Today’s private client wealth advisor lives in two worlds. The first is where they interact with their clients, manage relationships and solve problems, the second pulls their attention away from client work to shuffle information between steps, processes and systems to operate safely. Every time the advisor shifts between these worlds is a seam in their experience and there are fraying seams everywhere in the advisor’s experience.

A Day in the Life of the Advisor

The advisor's day is a calendar scheduled sequence of client connections and team orchestration across 9~10+ hours. 99% of client interactions are either non-digital (face to face meetings, phone calls) or digital but non-structured (video conference, client emails). They listen to unstructured information and translating it into structured organized information in forms, reports, software and systems (SEAMS). They expertly delegate and direct their team of planners, admin support as well as a network of affiliated professionals: Estate, Trust, Tax, Banking and Legal experts. A typical advisor day can consist of 3~5 client meetings, 2~3 team huddles, 6~10 client meeting prep and debriefs sessions.

“There are fraying seams everywhere in the advisor experience.”

Advisors are master curators of client information and relevance as well as compassion ambassadors balancing their client’s need for: information, education, assurance and financial guidance. Between 30% and 50% of the advisor’s daily time is spent managing seams in their infrastructure.

‍

The Advisor Burden and Their Techniques

Advisors carry massive burdens. The first is the mental load of operating the accountability as quarterback for the client value proposition: ensuring that the client is always heard and remembered. Information is never requested twice and is always retained & reused. The team operate as a connected group to the client. The second burden is to rapidly and effectively translate the client’s interests, investment priorities and risk appetite into a responsible wealth accumulation and optimization strategy that meets the client objectives. One of the largest burden's we consistently hear from advisors is the amount of information translation and relaying between: clients, support staff, system(s), experts and 3rd parties (government forms, banks, etc..). Advisors don’t need another system(s), they don’t need more shiny features. They already have various systems of records, intakes, forms and workflows – they don’t need yet another!

“Advisors need a way to connect the client interaction information into digitized teamwork and servicing fulfillment that takes work off (not puts work onto) their desks.”

Today’s advisor burden is that the last mile of the advisor experience remains mostly manual, unstructured, and prone to translation error (SEAMS, SEAMS, SEAMS)! The opportunity is automating the last mile of the advised experience and eliminating advisor seams.

Wealth Businesses Need to Operate More Like Tailors

Wealth businesses have needed to focus on the operations, processes, capability chains and the risk management of that wealth infrastructure. This was the equivalent of providing the fabric (wealth services) to the tailor (wealth advisor) for the advisor to create a bespoke suit for their clients. This meant that the advisor lived seams! Wealth businesses need to start passing a “made to measure” experiences to their advisors lowering the amount of work (Seams) and eliminating categories of work (mundane seams) so the advisor can provide the client a seamless experience with less lift.

This is no simple task. Wealth Management Businesses have focused on capability value chains for good reasons. It’s a way to control technical complexity and does not challenge existing business segment orthodoxies. As the market shifts its focus to growing less capital intensive (wealth) businesses, and the talent battle for top advisor talent heats up further - the Wealth Businesses that eliminate low value seams (data entry, information allocation, transcription, task setup/allocation) and free up time for their advisors to focus on clients & business growth will win both the productivity and the talent battles.

How is Technology (platforms specifically) Contributing?

Wealth advisor specific digital capabilities have been available and evolving for a long time. Salesforce introduced a wealth focused set of platform capabilities over a decade ago with the launch of Financial Service Cloud enabling Wealth specific interaction automation patterns. However just enabling advisor tailored digital capabilities is not sufficient assistance for wealth advisors. The introduction of householding and life events were helpful data-structures creating graphic visibility to client relationship information. The challenge is not technological it’s behavioural & motivational design.

“One of the biggest burdens on the advice team’s shoulders is taking in and transforming unstructured and non-digitized relationship information into relatable retainable format.”

The introduction of advisor centric digital capabilities creates more technology integrations for the organization or more data entry work for the advice team! On their own these capabilities create required digital capabilities but are insufficient to influence advisor behaviours as they don’t line up advisor motivation! Since they create more (data entry) work for the advice team, they lower motivation to use these digital capabilities. Platforms enable helpful capabilities but without persona led behaviour design, platforms do not solve for the human element of advisor behaviour enablement.

Automating the Mundane for the Advisor

The key to helping advisors is to invert the focus away from digital capabilities to advisor high impact and high frequency use cases. For example, three to five times a day an advisor wraps up a client meeting, they are holding 4~10 things they need to manage with only a few minutes to accurately record / retain what matters, before they prepare for their next client meeting (A valuable high impact seam!). Seasoned advisors capture digitized notes from their discussions quickly (Usually in Outlook or OneNote, sometimes a paper pad is still used too) and share/delegate follow up activities, clarifications and commitments to their planner / support assistant. They type free form note taking (unstructured data entry), task delegation, clarification & follow up (mental load) and client planning or investment portfolio design / simulation, etc.

“[...] provides the advisor the ability to confirm or adjust the suggested information, it structures and classifies the information & commitments to be managed and actioned by the advice team.”

Last mile automation reduces or eliminates the need for advice team data entry, extracts the information from interaction and then provide an appropriate digitized structured version of the interaction information (structure), it can be weighed (prioritized) and ultimately retained or actioned. The use case provides the advisor the ability to confirm or adjust the suggested information, it structures and classifies the information & commitments to be managed and actioned by the advice team.

What Could this Mean for a Wealth Business?

Advisor Seams elimination is a unique offering and specialty Electric Mind activated by the evolution of artificial intelligence applied in a behavioural context. This offering was shaped in 2023 and has been evolving & enhancing for over two years. We’ve supported a wealth management business with advisor group lab testing and saw incredible business results. An 80% reduction in specific (menial) task time which rolled up to a 20% advisor productivity gain overall. A 95% reduction in servicing task error rates on specific tasks and a complimentary 10% reduction in specific client complaints. Business Case analysis on scaling these techniques showed several value levers that drive meaningful profitable wealth business growth: advisor client portfolio loading, Private Client franchising (Private banking / insurance - # products per client), Advisor NPS, referral & retention, and 2nd line efficiency gains from irregularity (error) and risk reductions.

How Electric Mind can Help

At Electric Mind, we use our unique perspective, our innovation and technology forward experience within Wealth Management to drive behaviour transformation. Our team has assisted clients navigate every stage of building transformation cases, ensuring they are practical, tangible and impactful. Expertise in business case creation and approval has supported organizations in securing the right investments. Our “advisor seam diagnostic” assessment identifies and prioritizes “advice seams” by impact and frequency – bringing proven “seam remediations” techniques. Our advisor behaviour led program design approach structures wealth advisor transformation change. We have custom and platform powered technology implementation services to activate change as either rapid live prototyping or operationally ready advisor change. Our persona behaviour led-change management services go across the entire change lifecycle, not just before launch tool training guides!

Want to ensure you're eliminating seams and automating the mundane for your advisors?  Get in touch or Email us for a rapid assessment.