While fall 2016, according to the calendar, is technically just beginning, the industry's busy fall conference season has already been in full swing for a couple of months now, revealing the latest technology advisors will need to acquire in order to thrive in the rapidly changing wealth management environment.
Key themes on full display at the many industry and technology events included the new workflow, compliance and document management systems that will be needed to comply with the Department of Labor's new best interest rule, along with new integrated wealth platforms that bring together CRM, financial planning, risk analysis, portfolio management, performance reporting and white-label robo services in one integrated application.
"The new DOL rule has turned everyone into technology shoppers," said Steve Dunlap, President of Folio Dynamix, at his mid-September conference in San Antonio.
New Integrations Increase Advisor Productivity
Folio Dynamix announced several integration deals with popular advisor software packages, including MoneyGuidePro for financial planning, Risk Pro for risk analysis, Quovo for account aggregation and Scivantage for robo services. Known as the "Fiborg Constellation," this combination of systems will be integrated into the Folio Dynamix portfolio accounting, performance reporting and rebalancing platform to provide an end-to-end solution for advisors to better manage client relationships and minimize manual processes.
In a similar vein, SS&C Advent announced the release of the Black Diamond Wealth Platform at their conference, also held in mid-September, this time in San Diego. This new integrated technology stack of Advizr's financial planning and Riskalyze's risk analysis platforms, combined with Black Diamond's award-winning portfolio management, performance reporting and client portal, will give advisors a one-stop way to acquire all of these systems directly from Black Diamond to create the needed efficiencies and enhanced client experience advisors will need to deliver to stay profitable and one step ahead of low-cost robo competition.
On the forms front, Laser App held its popular financial services conference in late August, also in San Diego. Headlining the conference was Dale Brown, head of the Financial Services Institute. Brown indicated the cost to firms to comply with the new DOL rule in the form of new systems would be in the millions of dollars for broker-dealers, and less so for RIAs, due to their varying business models.
Continuing the integration theme discussed above and leveraging it to solve for DOL mandates, Laserfiche presented an advanced account opening process that uses its new Laserfiche forms platform to create an end-to-end workflow automation system by integrating client data directly from Junxure CRM, pushing that data into Laser App to complete forms and BICE contracts, and then routing directly to the client via Docusign's e-signature package to create an elegant, paperless, DOL-compliant, client onboarding process.
