In today's dynamic and ever-evolving financial landscape, client engagement has emerged as a crucial factor for success in financial advisory services.
Financial advisors who prioritize client engagement foster stronger relationships, build trust and create lasting partnerships. With the rapid advancement of technology, financial advisors now have access to a wide range of tools and platforms that can enhance client engagement, streamline processes, and deliver superior advice.
Many advisors are fearful to automate parts of their practice. The CEO and co-founder of Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze) explained how advisors can find that balance between automation and personalization. Click on the video below to watch the full interview.
Transcript:
A lot of advisors, they're a bit fearful about automating parts of their practice because they feel like that's where their value comes from. The truth is, the value that advisors deliver their clients is in the engagement with the client. It's leaning into all the things that make you an incredible human being, and allow you to engage with other human beings to drive changes in human behavior. Ultimately, that's really what financial advice is supposed to do – drive changes in human behavior.
If we're taking up our time hand-entering trading tickets into our custodial platform, or spending, I don't know, four or five, six hours stitching together PowerPoint presentations for that client meeting, the reality is we can use technology to solve a lot of those problems. We can have a growth platform where data is flowing in and all we've got to do is open that up, refresh the analytics and be ready to go – flip the screen around or put it on a page and show the client the things that we've been telling them for years.
I think that the way that you know as an advisor, which components of your practice really need automating, is you need to ask yourself, 'What is closer to where I'm delivering value to the client and what is farther away?'
The farther away it comes from what is truly delivering value into the client's life everyday are the things you should really be considering technology to automate. I'll go back to the PowerPoint analogy. Your client isn't getting a lot of value out of the 10 hours that you're spending creating that custom PowerPoint for the meeting with them. You could really take that prep time down to 10 or 15 minutes with data feeding into my growth platform where you can just flip your monitor around.
You can talk through these things that the clients need to know about, such as remembering what the goals are, and what direction they are headed – how much risk needed to take in order to reach goals. Then review how the portfolio has been doing in the context of the markets. It's important to drive that conversation, but we want to automate the things that are far away from delivering value. It's the engagement with the client that really drives the value.
It’s not complicated to find a balance between automation and personalization because of the unique way that financial advisors deliver value to their clients. It's in the connection, it's in the relationship, it's in behavioral coaching. That's the place where we want to spend time and it's natural to spend time there; it's not like you have an automatic way that you're going to calm clients down.
No, you're going to read the situation as a human being, you're going to understand their stress, you're going to understand that you know there's stuff going on in the markets that is stressing them out and has them in a bad place. You're going to help give them context and perspective to make good short-term decisions that are ultimately going to lead to that long-term financial outcome. It should be less complicated for us to think about automating busy work in our financial advice practices because ultimately, that's not going to be the big game changer that delivers value to the client.