If you want to know the state of affairs in advisor technology, be sure to make the annual trek to Joel Bruckenstein's Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference.
Those who braved the rain storms in Southern California in mid-February to check out this year's T3 will know that there has been a marked shift in the industry's view of digital advice and the ways advisors will use technology to better serve their clients and run their businesses.
"The pace of change is accelerating," noted Joel Bruckenstein in his opening remarks in front of nearly 80 advisor tech vendors and 600 attendees at the cozy Hyatt Garden Grove, tucked right next to Disneyland.
Bruckenstein was speaking about the many innovations in technology and perception shifts that are rapidly impacting wealth management. Top among those trends is the shift in the industry's view that robo technology should not be treated as competition for advisors, but rather as the key automation tool advisors can use to scale and streamline their practices while meeting client expectations for a more digital experience.
Embracing that theme in the first keynote of the conference was Aaron Klein, CEO of Riskalyze, who debuted new enhancements to his digital investment platform, Autopilot, that help advisors customize and scale their advice delivery.
"The problem with personalization is that it doesn't scale, and the problem with automation is that there is no personalization," Klein said. "What is needed is an automated account platform that streamlines the process to flexibly automate advice, while still personalizing the experience."
Klein is delivering on that premise with the launch of next generation tools and the Autopilot Partner Store, a marketplace that creates automated access to models, strategies and research from some of the industry's top asset managers and strategists.
Jessica Liberi, vice president of product management for eMoney, presented her firm's latest developments such as the expanded launch of Advisor Branded Marketing technology, a marketing toolkit that offers custom-branded, multi-media marketing campaigns for generating and nurturing leads via the eMoney dashboard.
Liberi also gave the crowd a look into the future by demoing voice-technology integration with Amazon's Echo Alexa to ping the eMoney database about various client situations, status of retirement plans and other account-related information. As Alexa provided detailed answers to Liberi's queries, the crowd was impressed.
Kicking off Day 2 was the much-anticipated announcement from Orion Advisor Services of the launch of their next generation trading and rebalancing platform Eclipse.
