The Biggest Challenges Advisors Face Building Their Tech Stack

 

Recorded at the T3 Advisor Conference 2022.  Presented by:

Advisorpedia interviewed Kartik Srinivasan, Head of 3rd Party Integrations for Digital Advisor Solutions at Charles Schwab, at the T3 Advisor Conference in May, 2022.

Related: The Biggest Mistake Advisors Make with FinTech

Transcript:

The biggest challenges that are is for face with building their tech stacks and future proofing their business, it's all about what technology provides advisors the scale and ability to grow. You know, advisors are increasingly looking for growth and scaling their businesses, how do I support more clients and provide better experiences for my clients.

And so the technology tools that they choose, need to be capable of supporting that. . .

So it's got to be cloud based, it's got to be extensible, it's got to be able to support the growth, and also the new it, we're in a hybrid situation where advisors may not meet, meet face to face with their clients anymore. So a lot of clients have relocated gone to different states, they've, they moved away. And so advisors need to be able to support that. And so using technology, to be able to tailor experiences, whether it's through those zoom meetings, it's through the client portal that I mentioned about, those are going to be critical things that advisors need to work on, in order to support their clients.

So that's a that's kind of a big, big thing that we're seeing and kind of where innovation is growing in the space. Yeah, so the advisory practice of the future is really going to be all about a couple of the trends that I mentioned. One, it's got to be personalized. How do we provide the end client and investor with a personal experience? And then we're moving away from purely talking about investment performance? And how do I add value through the investment selection process. And it's moving more into complete wealth management and financial planning.

So we've seen a big increase in not just financial planning tools and capabilities, but tailoring that to specific clients, whether it's estate planning or, you know, having to do with tax analysis. And so the practice of the future really is going to be an advisor that's going to be able to support and an investor that has a variety of needs, and the ability to either have that expertise in house through the use of technology, or to outsource it to other other firms out there.

And Schwab helps here because, again, we have a growing network of ecosystem of third party providers, we work with all the major financial planning tools and providers out there. And so really, how to advise their future proof their business, it's all about scaling their practice, working to serve the various clients that have different niches and interest and to and to integrate all that together in a personalized experience.