Growing meaningful client relationships remains the top priority for every wealth management firm. The expected transfer of wealth, greater client expectations for personalized experiences, ever-expanding product, and service offerings, and evolving regulatory changes present both opportunities and challenges.
The critical role of enablement, supported with enablement technology, is the missing link for wealth management firms looking to better support both advisors and clients. The research organization Gartner defines enablement as: the activities, systems, processes, and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with client and prospects. In fact, according to LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise 2024 report, sales enablement is one of the fastest-growing roles in the US.
Enablement technology supports advisors’ goals by helping them engage with clients, elevate their marketing and prospecting efforts, complete administrative tasks, deliver impactful meetings, and fulfill learning requirements. When integrated with CRM (Customer Relationship Management), financial planning and other tools, enablement plays a key role to empower advisors and their teams – providing them with a better way to prepare, present & follow up; personalize client and prospect interactions; promote their practice; and increase expertise and knowledge.
Optimizing the tech stack to better address advisor expectations
According to Cerulli’s State of US Wealth Management Technology 2024 Report, advisor practices that are more extensively incorporating the use of technology within their practice are growing at faster rates than practices that are not. According to the report, challenges to the effective use of technology include lack of integration between tools/applications, with 71% respondents citing this as a barrier for greater adoption.
While integrating and optimizing tech stacks presents challenges for firms, prioritizing precisely what enablement technology brings to the table – helping to personalize client experiences, deliver impactful meetings and increase impact of practice management initiatives – can do much to deliver a better experience for both advisor and client.
Enablement technology, when integrated with CRM and financial planning tools, can help to accelerate adoption of tech stacks by aligning to top day-to-day activities – including sourcing content, meeting preparation & delivery, coaching and learning - performed by advisors.
Meet clients’ expectations for personalized experiences
Enablement technology provides a single, centralized content library from which advisors receive AI-powered, hyper-relevant content recommendations with every search. Advisors can even subscribe to curated feeds, so they are regularly served up with marketing-created and marketing-approved third-party content that is certain to be up-to-date and compliant.
Through integrations with CRMs, advisors can do more than simply find content; they can discover the most effective content for a given client – based on client interactions and preferences. Dependent on type of CRM and configuration employed, advisors can also customize and collaborate on content with compliance in mind.
Speaking of sharing content, it is now critical for advisors to do so over social media. With Gen Z projected to inherit $84 trillion by 2045, they represent historic opportunities for the industry. As such, advisors must connect meaningfully with this demographic, 66% of whom say social media is essential to their daily lives.
Enablement technology can search thousands of publications for content relevant to an advisor’s target audience while performing compliance and risk checks based on words, topics, publishers, and competitors.
Deliver consistently impactful meetings
Client meetings are the most important means of engagement between advisor and client. But delivering memorable and personalized meeting experiences remains a challenge for most advisors and support staff.
Their biggest barriers are a lack of time, inefficient processes, and outdated tech stacks. An integrated tech stack anchored on a CRM and enablement capabilities now plays a vital role in helping advisors simplify meeting preparation, delivery, and follow-up. By taking this approach, firms are better positioned to support compliance requirements and deliver consistently meaningful experiences.
Meeting preparation includes several tasks like scheduling, agenda setting, and assembling content. According to the Cerulli US Advisor 2023 Metrics report, advisors spend 32% of their time conducting and preparing for client meetings. Given the value of these interactions, this is a fair allocation of time, but there remains an opportunity to streamline preparation activities so more time can be devoted to conducting the meetings themselves.
For many advisors, personalizing content for each client is complicated and time-consuming: it involves logging into multiple systems, downloading reports, aggregating materials from multiple locations, etc. This approach also compromises the quality of the client experience, as a lack of consistency and adherence to brand standards are a common result.
With the right tech in place, advisors can automate the production of content, using account, opportunity, and industry data from their CRM and other sources. This allows advisors to efficiently update and personalize content at scale.
When time-consuming tasks associated with meeting preparation are automated, the time spent preparing dwindles from hours to minutes, providing the advisor with more time to think about the meeting agenda and desired outcomes.
Enablement technology, powered by AI, also offers advisors a powerful way to remove the complexities associated with leading and facilitating high-quality meetings. AI-powered enablement technology grants advisors and their teams the ability to prepare playlists of content and materials to have at the ready. It also automatically transcribes audio with recommended action steps, empowering advisors to singularly focus on what they do best: deliver their valuable experience and guidance.
The value of AI extends beyond the meeting, offering simple ways for advisors to follow up in a timely and meaningful way. Advancements in enablement technology (aided by AI) offer summaries of action items and the ability to drop relevant information in a Digital Sales Room - a microsite for content sharing - with a single click. This results in timelier and more relevant follow-up experiences that deepen trust and loyalty.
With meetings conducted in this more modern way, advisors, support staff and home office teams now have access to an expanded set of analytics, leaving firms better positioned to understand the impact of training, coaching, practice management, and marketing programs.
Elevate impact of practice management and advisor onboarding initiatives
Clients expect their financial advisors to offer comprehensive services that encompass various aspects of financial planning, including estate planning, tax planning and insurance advice. They also expect their advisor to offer expertise on investing, which has radically changed over the last few years, as affluent investors look to invest in alternative asset classes, including private equity, real estate, and digital assets. Coupled with these requirements is the need for advisors to be more digitally savvy in how they manage their practice and acquire clients.
Advances in enablement technology provide capabilities that help advisors onboard more quickly, hone skills faster, and reach goals more often. Advisors, branch managers and other leaders can build high-performing teams through practice sessions that leverage AI to provide advisors with feedback on filler word usage, keyword accuracy, speaking pace and confidence level. Learning dashboards tied to CRM data can also provide valuable insight on the impact of training and learning programs towards business goals.
Enablement technology is a vital component of the modern advisor’s tech stack
The wealth management industry has an increasing number of challenges to face, but great opportunities also lie ahead. Enablement technology can streamline and alleviate these challenges, empowering advisors to continue building strong client relationships, offer personalized guidance and increase their knowledge and expertise.
Interested in reading the US WealthTech Landscape Report 2024? You can read the report online here.
ABOUT THE US WEALTH LANDSCAPE REPORT 2024
The US WealthTech Landscape Report 2024 has been designed to showcase the pivotal role that technology plays in the evolving landscape of US wealth management.
With the rapid pace of change in financial services, understanding technology's impact on this sector is more crucial than ever. This US-focused Landscape Report features a series of insightful articles that explore the trends, challenges, and innovations surrounding technology adoption in wealth management. Contributions come from a range of organizations, including Advisor360, Alpha Tech Partners, Aureus Advantage, Croesus, Diamond Wealth, ERI, First Rate, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, Malka Media, Pirker Partners, Seismic, and Transcend Capital Advisors.
The report also features a section dedicated to a series of solution provider showcases, offering insights into the offerings and capabilities of the firms featured. This section is designed to provide an overview of a selection of solutions available on the market today, showcasing some of the available technology tools and partners that might address your business needs. Finally, we culminate the report with the directory section that introduces our online Solution Provider Directory (SPD) and references the size of market relevant to the US wealth management sector.
Interested in reading the US WealthTech Landscape Report 2024? You can read the report online here.
ABOUT THE WTLR SERIES
Our goal with our WealthTech Landscape Reports (WTLRs), is to collate relevant, insightful content and comments from both wealth managers and vendors operating in a specific region. Each WTLR is founded on a curated directory of hundreds of relevant technology and related solution providers to the business needs of the wealth management community in focus. The directory is supported by a rich variety of thought leadership articles and interviews with industry participants from both buy and sell side, plus a section of Solution Showcases. We also look at country, regional, and sectoral trends.
If you are interested in contributing to our WealthTech Landscape Report series, don't hesitate to get in touch.
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