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Highlights From The Inaugural AdviceTech.Live Conference

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Executive Summary

On August 27, Asset Map hosted its inaugural AdviceTech.Live conference. The one-day virtual event brought together several AdvisorTech executives and industry influencers, as well as 700 registrants (77% of whom were advisors) to talk shop about where the industry, in general, and advisor-facing technologies are headed. Moreover, the event hosts (headed by Adam Holt, CEO of Asset Map) and sponsors committed to promote and discuss the ongoing issues of racial and gender diversity in the financial advice industry, with 50% of all ticket sales (or $25,000) going to the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning Diversity Initiatives.

In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – shares his signature Twitter-driven recap of the conference, which featured panel discussions around five key AdvisorTech categories. Craig kicks off the recap with highlights from the opening keynote address from Adam Holt, who spoke with D.A. Abrams, Managing Director, Center for Financial Planning, on the diversity initiatives from the CFP Board (highlighting once again the fact that under 4% of CFP professionals are people of color and only 23% are women), and Asset-Map’s interactive AdviceTech Compass tool (which provides a unique way of browsing vendors across categories). From there, panel discussion highlights included:

  • Marketing Automation – This category has been booming since the pandemic began, as advisors look to not only find new ways to connect with prospective clients but also for tools to stay in touch with existing clients as well (since 30% of existing clients who leave their advisor reported lack of communication as a top reason);
  • CRM Solutions – The panel had a wide-ranging discussion, with particularly useful insights around the ease of use of CRM solutions and how firms realize the true value of a CRM when it truly becomes the central hub of an advisor business;
  • Financial Planning – The big takeaway was that, while offerings in this category seem to all be morphing into hybrid solutions, this doesn’t mean that they are all becoming indistinguishable. On the contrary, each has tremendous variability in functionality, workflow, and user interface. Moreover, the panelists agreed that they are looking beyond simply providing reports and towards ways to influence and change investor behavior;
  • Portfolio Management – This panel highlighted the ongoing trend towards creating unified platforms while adding functionality and integrations (which has been a thorn in AdvisorTech vendors’ sides), such as Envestnet’s recent integration that automatically moves clients’ cash around to capitalize on the best available yields.
  • Practice Multipliers – The overarching theme from this panel was that, as it becomes increasingly clear that how an advisor uses their time influences their overall success, AdvisorTech solutions that enhance workflow efficiency become more and more important… particularly those that act as business multipliers for growth.

Given the disruptions to the financial advisor conference industry created by the pandemic and the ongoing shift in the conference model itself, the AdviceTech.Live event was a successful vendor-led virtual conference. And although advisors attend such conferences to stay up to date on the latest features of products they already use and to discover new solutions, one of the biggest takeaways was the ability of the vendors themselves to better understand the current layout of the AdvisorTech landscape. Ultimately, the inaugural AdviceTech.Live was a successful virtual conference, with plenty of room to expand in the coming years to cover a wider array of AdvisorTech categories. And its support for diversity and inclusion in the industry only helps emphasize the fact that conferences can not only provide a venue for ongoing learning but allow for the support of a cause that is essential to the growth and health of the industry.

Author: Craig Iskowitz

Guest Post

Craig Iskowitz is CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a management consulting firm providing advice to the financial services industry on marketing and technology strategy. Ezra Group works with RIA’s, broker-dealers and banks to help them make sound technology decisions, identify growth opportunities and energize their marketing.  Craig is also the publisher of the blog Wealth Management Today, which provides in-depth analysis of trends and issues facing the wealth management industry. Craig can be reached at craig@ezragroupllc.com.

“Do your little bit of good wherever you are, putting everyone’s together can change the world.”
— Desmond Tutu, human rights activist

On June 10, I received an email from Adam Holt, CEO of Asset Map.  It said, “You have 15 minutes this week? I want to bring you into something you will love.”  It was an idea for a virtual conference that would combine open and honest discussions of advisor-focused technology with tangible support for diversity and inclusion in our industry.

The fact that the idea came from Adam, someone I have a tremendous amount of respect for, and that it merged a business event with doing good, I was 110% on board!

And that’s how the AdviceTech.Live conference came to be.  Exactly 11 weeks and a day after that email, the one-day-only event took place with over 700 registrations and a topflight group of vendors and industry influencers participating.  It was a testament to the efforts and dedication of Adam, and especially his team at Asset Map, who worked tirelessly to pull everything together.

The conference was streamed live using the Bizzabo virtual conference technology platform, which was a first for me, but it worked out very well supporting the event. It was easy to navigate through the agenda to select the panel that you wanted to watch, and you could also visit the virtual exhibit hall to meet with any of the vendors.

According to the Asset-Map team, 77% of registrations were advisors, 19% were vendors, and the rest were media and online influencers.

The agenda was broken out into the following sessions:

  1. Keynote: CFP Board Diversity & Inclusion Initiative
  2. Session: CRM
  3. Session: Financial Planning
  4. Session: Marketing Automation
  5. Session: Portfolio Management
  6. Session: Practice Multipliers

Here are a few of the ideas I pitched to Adam for the name of the conference:

  • Wealthtech Collective Virtual Conference 2020 #WealthtechCollective20
  • Advisortech Consortium Online Conference 2020 #AdvisortechConsortium20 #AdvisortechCon20
  • #AdvisortechAllstars20
  • #AdvisortechOnline20
  • Advisortech Innovation Summit #AIS2020
  • Advisortech Online Summit #AOS2020
  • Advisortech Connect 2020 #AdvisortechConnect20

Personally, I think AdvisortechAllStars had a nice ring to it. But fortunately, Adam didn’t listen to me and went with his idea of AdviceTech.Live, which turned out to be the right choice.

CFP Diversity & Inclusion Project

The opening session was hosted by Adam Holt, CEO of Asset Map, who spoke with D.A. Abrams, Managing Director, Center for Financial Planning.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences, but I thought this kickoff presentation was one of the most informative and directionally useful.  Two big ideas: 1) the diversity initiatives from the CFP Board and 2) the Asset-Map AdviceTech Compass tool.

There are only a few good industry graphics that provide an overview of advisor and enterprise wealth technology.  The Kitces Advisortech Map is probably the best.  I predict that #2 will soon be the Asset-Map AdviceTech Compass.  What I like about it is that it’s interactive and you can drill down into specific categories to see the products in each.  It’s a work-in-progress and has a lot of holes, but it’s a different way of looking at a market that can be unusually complex and has a lot of products that overlap multiple categories.

I expect to see a steady improvement in its content and usability.

These statistics clearly show some serious problems for the CFP Board. Which is one reason why they need our support. They charged $70 per ticket, although many discounted and free tickets were offered. But overall, the ATL one-day event raised $25,000 for the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative to create a more diverse and sustainable financial planning profession.

We still have a long way to go!

According to DA Abrams, there has been a 75% increase in the number of CFPs under age 30 since 2016, but there are still more who are over age 70!

A trillion dollars isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still a lot of money.  In an industry flooded with applications that are often indistinguishable in functionality, Asset Map stands out as a differentiated solution.

Asset Map is a tool that is complementary to financial planning software. It builds a visual representation of a client’s entire financial life including all income, liabilities, and insurance — all on a single page.

Asset Map does not compete directly with full-stack financial planning applications like MoneyGuidePro, eMoney Advisor, or Naviplan.  It’s in a sub-category called Specialized Planning Tools by the Asset Map Compass that includes apps the focus on college planning, tax management, information management, or lending such as:

Advisor Marketing Tech

While many technology vendors have seen sales and implementations take a dip starting in March/April, some categories have been booming.  Marketing automation products are among those that have been taking orders almost non-stop since the crisis began. After all, with so many in-person marketing strategies no longer feasible in a socially distant environment, advisors have to turn somewhere for growth.

Though notably, marketing automation tools are increasingly about more than just marketing to new clients. 30% of existing clients who leave their advisors reported a lack of communication as a top reason. Automated marketing tools provide a scalable method for connecting with existing clients, as well as prospects, both of which can be targeted and personalized by the algorithms.

Kevin Mulhern and his team at AdvisorStream have built a strong entrant in the content distribution category. Their combination of user-friendly technology and licensing deals with key media outlets provides a unique end-investor experience that I’m surprised no one has copied yet. When an investor clicks on a link to read an article, they aren’t taken to the media outlet’s website, where other advertising can distract them. They are taken directly to the article as if they were going to a media website, except the only thing they see besides the story is the advisor’s picture, brand, and contact info. What could be better?

TwentyOverTen was primarily known for building advisor websites. They made a bold move back in February, launching their first software product called Lead Pilot, which got them into the automated marketing category with email marketing campaigns, content libraries, and social media scheduling all in one. Definitely good timing (at least from a business perspective) to have launched a digital marketing solution just weeks before the pandemic went into full outbreak mode and traditional advisor marketing got shut down!

Notwithstanding the growth in advisor digital marketing solutions, though, it’s worth noting that there are questions about the size of the total addressable market for automated marketing software that targets financial advisors and how many products can be supported. After all, there are literally thousands of general software applications that automate some or all parts of marketing for multiple verticals, financial services being just one.

Companies like HubSpot, InfusionSoft, and SharpSpring already offer a robust set of integrated features that can be leveraged to run complex marketing campaigns with in-depth analytics for tweaking the system and delivering the best results.

And so when a large percentage of wealth management firms use general marketing software, do more RIAs and advisors really need more industry-specific software? And if they do, it is only a matter of time before those broad-based vendors like HubSpot launch target-specific verticals with customized versions of their platforms, similar to Salesforce, which stayed generic for a long time until they saw a critical mass of clients in investment advisory and launched Financial Services Cloud.

Anyone who has been on LinkedIn for more than five minutes knows that there are at least a million lead generation companies bombarding you with connection requests.  Assuming that any of these services actually work, Robert Sofia makes an excellent point that it doesn’t matter how many leads you bring in if you can’t close them!  That’s a very different skill and doesn’t directly correlate directly to any specific technology.

While this is a metaphor, the way we often see it play out is when clients decide to purchase a new software solution and expect it to be a silver bullet and solve all of their problems.  This never happens!  No single piece of tech can solve all of your business problems.  You not only need an entire toolbox, but all of the tools have to work together and be integrated into your key business processes to deliver successful results.

Another tip from Sofia: “Not all audiences are the same, so don’t treat them that way.”

This is a derivative of the Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”  I can’t tell you how many wealth management firms don’t plan ahead when it comes to the less sexy aspects of technology infrastructure structure like administration, data architecture, and retiring technical debt. Too much kicking the can down the road. Yes, the best time to take down that duplicate system was five years ago when the replacement application was launched. The second-best time is now. Putting off the decision for another 3-5 years is not going to make the problem go away!

FMG Suite was recently acquired by private equity Aurora Capital Partners from venture capital firm K1 Investment Management.  While Aurora’s portfolio doesn’t include any other wealth management software companies that would have any synergy with FMG Suite, they do own insurance software vendor Zywave, which they bought in 2013 after it was split off from what is now Advicent Solutions, makers of Naviplan financial planning software.

The new PE owners don’t have much experience in the wealth management space, so hopefully, they will keep the current FMG Suite management team and boost their budgets in product development, marketing, and sales to keep the company growing and able to serve more advisors.

CRM Solutions

As is the case with all of the technology presented at this conference, Client Relationship Management (CRM) is more than just software.  To deliver the most value to an advisory firm requires adoption and implementing workflows and processes so that it can truly operate as the central hub of the advisory business. The panel was able to touch on this as part of their wide-ranging discussion with the top CRM vendors.

This was a quote from our pre-event podcast held with the conference moderators.  There are too many copycat products all looking to check the boxes of features that every other vendor has instead of innovating and developing new features or looking for ways to improve the advisor and client experiences.

InvestmentNews found that the top 15% of independent, fee-based advisory firms all use CRM and had 26% more client households per professional and 79% more profit per professional.

Ease of use is a critical part of the best-managed firms’ selection of a CRM.  There are two ways to implement a new CRM. One way is to select the program that is the most widely used by other firms and adapt your workflows to fit how it operates. The other way, which I think is better, is to document the way your firm operates, and select the CRM that best matches your workflows.

Moderator Toussaint Bailey asked the panel of vendors, “What is the most under-utilized feature of your product?” I thought this was a fantastic question!  It’s common knowledge that the average user never gets beyond the first 10% or 20% of features in almost any application. They just don’t have the time or the need to explore them.

Advice for advisors looking to update their tech stack?

Kathy Crowley, Business Development Manager at Junxure/Advisor Engine, gave 5 pieces of advice when updating your tech stack:

  1. Leadership must embrace the choice
  2. Invest in training
  3. Don’t try to do too much at once
  4. Clean up your data (as applicable)
  5. Involve your team and get buy-in

CRM Best Practices

Here are four best practices for advisory firms to get the most out of their CRM:

  1. CRM As The Data Hub. Most financial advisory firms have data spread out across multiple locations, including portfolio management systems, custodians, spreadsheets, emails, etc. Your CRM can act as the hub where all client data can be consolidated to ease aggregation and analysis and improve business operations.
  2. CRM As A Corporate Memory. Many employees interact with clients from advisers, paraplanners, to admins. No matter who took the phone call, had the meeting, or received the email, the CRM should be the consolidator of these interactions. The company mantra should be, “If it isn’t in the CRM, it didn’t happen!” This helps to keep lines of communication open and to make sure no client interaction is ever lost.
  3. CRM Should Facilitate External Communication. It shouldn’t take an admin half a day to pull together a list of clients and print a letter with labels. The CRM offers robust and intuitive tools to create lists of contacts, generate personalized letters and emails to help connect with clients, and build strong and long-lasting relationships.
  4. CRM Managing Internal Processes. Workflow management is one of the most under-utilized components of a CRM system. Assignments of tasks and order of responsibility help define employee accountability and outline a transparent action plan for every key company process.

Financial Planning

According to some of the latest research from Kitces.com, How Financial Planners Actually Do Financial Planning (2020), the most popular financial planning software programs are: MoneyGuidePro (34.5%), eMoneyAdvisor (34.3%), RightCapital (13%), NaviPlan (6%), and MoneyTree (5%).

Everything is morphing into a hybrid solution. Whether it’s robo-advisors adding humans or financial planning applications merging cash-flow and goal-based planning, it seems that combinations of tools are more attractive to a larger number of advisors.  There used to be clearly defined separation between the top financial planning applications between cash-flow based (eMoney, Naviplan, RightCapital, MoneyTree) and goal-based (MoneyGuidePro) but that line is blurring as they all start to move towards each other.

There are arguments being made that goal-based planning isn’t as beneficial to clients because it puts the cart before the horse; maybe clients shouldn’t be selecting goals to pursue until they understand what the possibilities are in the first place.  This would require using financial planning not as a straightforward analytical tool but as a conversation starter to explore what is available to the client based on their cash flows.

Kevin Hughes from Envestnet | MoneyGuide pointed out that their application recently added a cash bucket feature that provides the ability to model a reserve of cash to ride out down periods in the market. Meanwhile, as Tony Stich showed in his presentation, Naviplan is adding some goal-based features that eMoney and RightCapital already have.

This doesn’t mean that all of these financial planning software applications are (or are becoming) the same!  They are converging to some extent, but there are still tremendous differences in functionality, configuration, and especially workflow and user interface. Every advisor should take a few apps for a test drive to decide which one is best for him or her.

They’re also looking for ways to not just provide reports on what should be done, but also looking for ways to influence and change investor behavior in ways that are beneficial to them long-term.  Human beings are irrational and sometimes, no matter how beneficial an action can be, if it requires a behavior change, it can be a major roadblock, warned Hughes.

On the other hand, recent Kitces Research on how advisors are actually adopting financial planning software suggests that advisors aren’t actually finding significant time-savings efficiencies with their planning software; the tools tend to help advisors go deeper with clients, instead of faster, raising the question of how financial planning software may need to change further to actually accomplish the goal of serving a wider range of clientele?

Portfolio Management

I was totally stoked to run this panel!  Having the top four vendors in the category available to answer any questions I wanted was too good an opportunity to pass up!

It was especially timely after I researched and published this article, 50 Portfolio Management Software Solutions For Advisors Can’t All Survive, about how there are likely “too many” portfolio management software solutions (more than can be supported by the available advisor marketplace). Fortunately, I anticipate these four vendors (Envestnet, Orion Advisor, Morningstar and SS&C) will surely make the cut!

Envestnet has built out quite a robust platform that is able to service enterprise firms including some of the largest broker-dealers, banks, and RIAs. While they have made a string of acquisitions over the years, they have mostly built their software organically, choosing to ditch most of the code from the competitors they bought.

Tamarac has the largest market share of $1 billion+ RIAs with 40%, which is even more impressive considering that this number has been increasing.  While some criticized their decision to keep Tamarac as a separate system from their ENV2 enterprise platform, it has enabled them to focus on different market segments that do not have the same feature needs or respond to the same user experiences.

Envestnet has also been steadily adding new functionality and integrations to stay on top of the market. Their most recent news was an integration with Flourish Cash that provides a cash management solution that advisors can offer to their clients. Flourish uses algorithms to monitor FDIC-insured accounts to find the best rates, and then automatically moves the client cash around as rates change to take advantage of the best available yields. This is becoming a more popular service category as interest rates have been stuck near zero (so every bit of basis point yield shopping really shows!).

I’ve been slowly adding items to my Apple Computer Museum and displaying them on Zoom calls.  That’s an original 1988 Macintosh Plus that she circled above. Look for new additions coming this month!

Practice Multipliers

“We’ve entered a risk-first decade,” stated Aaron Klein, CEO of Riskalyze.

In a recent 1,000+ advisor Kitces Research study on “How Financial Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning,” the most time spent is meeting with current clients, for almost 9 hours a week, plus another 5 hours of meeting prep, and nearly 7 hours of financial planning, investment, and other analytical work to answer client questions. This in turn creates an average of 6 hours of follow-through client servicing tasks. In total, the average advisor spends 26.7 hours every week on direct client activities. Which means time is scarce, and every bit of time savings for an advisor’s workflows really matters.

Everplans is another app that has carved out some space for itself by focusing on being an easy-to-use, as a secure and trusted location to store all of the information families need to manage their financial lives. Most financial planning applications have some ability to store this data, but Everplans is unique in that it’s agnostic to all other software. You could switch financial planning platforms, without clients having to reenter all of their personal data or re-upload all of their personal documents.

Legal documents such as wills, powers of attorney, and trusts can all be stored as well as all financial accounts such as investments, banking, credit cards, annuities, and pensions. While watching this panel, I signed up for an Everplans account! It’s easy to use and upload everything that’s important around managing your finances and property that you’d want your loved ones to have in case of an emergency.

I don’t totally agree with Klein here, because I feel a lot of technology can be classified as an expense. If there is a specific piece of technology that isn’t part of the core stack that is needed for day to day operations but instead acts as a business multiplier for growth, then I would consider it an investment.

It would be nice if more firms did the kind of planning Klein is describing, but most do not.  They have learned through experience what the minimum required technology is to run their business, and they focus too much on keeping the overall cost as low as possible instead of calculating the return on investment, which is complicated. There is no *right* dollar amount to reach your long-term goals.  But it’s probably a lot more than you’re spending today, and it also includes a lot of people and process work that you haven’t budgeted for.

LifeYield is a company that carved out its own category when they launched back in 2008. Their focus was tax-efficient withdrawals to fund retirement income and they were able to land deals with wirehouses like Merrill Lynch because their solution was very targeted and unique in the industry.  (Check out my interview with founder & CEO Mark Hoffman)

Tax management and tax optimization are now features of many portfolio management systems and standalone portfolio rebalancing tools, but LifeYield has kept its edge by continuing to innovate in both product and marketing, which is equally important. Their Taxficient Score is one example of the merging of both which assigns a simple value to a client’s portfolio. The closest example would be Riskalyze’s Risk Score. Both compress a lot of complex calculations and data into a single number, which is an abstraction but is necessary to explain these concepts to clients.

Wrap Up Moderator Session

This was a terrific way to close out the conference.  I would recommend that every virtual event do something like this to wrap up and provide thoughts on takeaways.

“My big takeaway was that these firms are committed to helping advisors improve engagement. The overall theme of the event was financial advisors should use the tech they’re actually going to use.” — Marguerita Cheng, CEO, Blue Ocean Global Wealth

While panel discussions are always interesting, some people attend conferences to stay up to date on the latest features of products they know and discover new products. That is still true, even for virtual events.  Even some of the moderators were enlightened about some of the vendors, which can only be a good thing.

“For me, the biggest takeaway was the ability to map these competitors on the financial technology landscape.” — Toussaint Bailey, CEO, Enso Wealth

There are so many vendors in our space with new ones cropping up every year, that just knowing which categories a vendor fits can become overwhelming.  As vendors expand their feature sets, they begin to overlap across categories in an attempt to become stickier and take over more of an advisor’s everyday lives.

Whether you’re using a product for the first time or it’s been running at your firm for ten years or more, the industry is shifting towards the need for hyper-relevant and targeted content, noted Cheng, especially true as investors are bombarded with a seemingly endless flood of information.  Advisors need to find an edge in order to cut through the noise.

Diversity was the most popular answer when asked what they wished their panels spoke about more.  Renee Norse suggested a separate panel to discuss issues around diversity and inclusion. Toussaint Bailey was hoping to hear the vendors explain what kind of clients would not be a good fit for their product (not sure I’ve ever heard a vendor talk about this).

https://twitter.com/craigiskowitz/status/1299026070600114176

“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”

A groundswell of support has been sweeping the industry. LPL Financial, the largest IBD, announced new members of its Advisor Inclusion Council to support diversity efforts across its 16,000 advisors.  Consciously pursuing diversity “offers a range of benefits for recruiting, retention, and firm culture,” according to a recent FlexShares study on diversity. But hurdles for the industry are high.  The study reveals that investors are more likely to choose advisors like them in ethnicity or race with 98% of white clients working with white advisors and just over 62% of non-white or Asian clients working with non-white or Asian advisors. Unfortunately, when advisory firms rank efforts most important for their growth plans, attracting and hiring more diverse talent is second to last —  coming in ahead of hiring professionals who were re-entering the job market or changing careers.

For Next Year

The conference was a tremendous success! I’m already looking forward to this becoming an annual event and blocking out the date for next year. I’d like to see a few more panels to include categories such as:

  • Digital advice platforms (robo-advisors for advisors)
  • Risk profiling/risk assessment (this was wrapped into the Practice Multipliers panel)
  • Business intelligence (analytics and dashboards that can help RIAs and broker-dealers manage their businesses at a higher level and look across multiple data silos)
  • Compliance
  • Reporting
  • All-in-One Platforms

https://twitter.com/AssetMapLLC/status/1298959747148808193

If only every virtual event ran as efficiently as this first AdviceTech.Live!  Another huge shout-out and a million kudos to the Asset-Map team who didn’t quit their day jobs, but still did all of the thousands of little things required to shepherd 20+ panelists and moderators (very similar to herding cats). Plus managing all of the vendors who stepped up for this worthy cause and manned their digital booths, which I think worked out well. Certainly wasn’t as tiring as walking the floor of a convention center until your feet fell off.

In the meantime, for those who couldn’t attend – and have their registration fees help to support diversity and inclusion – there’s still time to head over to the CFP Board and make a donation to their Diversity & Inclusion Initiative!

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