After reflecting last month on the past 35 years of advisor technology, it is exciting to shift our focus to the future. Considering the rapid pace of change up to today, should we expect the trend of better, faster and cheaper (relatively speaking) products to continue? I don't have a crystal ball and could never pinpoint exactly how technology will evolve; however, I do believe there are several "themes" that will play an important role in shaping the technology environment of the future.
The personalization of technology will be a significant theme, and we've already seen a lot of progress in this area. Each day, you are building a "digital fingerprint" of how you interact with technology. This information can and will be more broadly used across multiple technology platforms and solutions. Today, most personalization features are specific to a device or program. The opportunity for the future is how this information (your digital fingerprint) is further leveraged to customize your experience, regardless of the device or program you're using. Put simply, it already knows what you prefer based on what you have done in the past.
We live in a connected world driven by your data connection speed. Using your office's broadband connection, you run complex reports with significant data requirements. However, you wouldn't want to do this same process using a slower connection speed. A theme for the future will be greater access to faster data connection speeds. By itself, this is not a big surprise; essentially, you will have more places where you can do more work. What will be interesting is how we use the faster speeds. Will the increase in data speeds be matched with larger data requirements? The answer is probably yes, which will put more pressure on advisors to keep their technology up to date.
Much of the technology we access today is driven by the operating system we prefer. You might have an Apple-based environment or a Windows-based environment, and of course you have computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices that go along with it. In the future, the distinct functional differences between various devices and systems will not be as great. We will still have strong opinions on which ones are better, of course, but the underlying capabilities and options available across devices will be more consistent.
