If you want to get a glimpse into the future of advisor technology, spend an hour with Ram Nagappan, chief information officer of Pershing.
He and his team of technologists in the Advanced Technology Lab at Pershing have been very busy developing the next iteration of Pershing's workstation, and are beginning to deploy some very advanced technology to make advisor's lives easier.
Nagappan and his crew held court at the annual Pershing INSITE conference held in mid-June in sunny San Diego, where over 2,000 attendees packed into the Manchester Grand Hyatt for three days of networking, industry content and technology demonstrations.
As part of an aggressive technology rollout, Pershing is launching a re-design of its popular NetX360 workstation, used by over 100,000 advisors on a daily basis. Called NetX360-Wealth, the new front-end portal will provide what Pershing is calling the "Integrated Wealth Experience."
According to Nagappan, the Integrated Wealth Experience is a quantum-leap technology initiative designed to focus on experience-centric designs, an improvement upon current advisor technology that is focused on account- or transaction-based experiences.
"What we are doing is taking the entire value chain of work that an advisor and their staff does — from prospecting to planning to onboarding to trading, reporting and ongoing client management — and creating a seamless, integrated experience," Nagappan said.
This differs from the current custodial industry technology approach that is more task-based or menu-driven, which results in a workflow that is not consistent, prone to errors and requires manual entry, pulling data from multiple, disparate systems.
"We are creating workflow orchestration behind the scenes to remove the complexity so that we can provide a singular experience," Nagappan said.
As part of this new approach, Pershing is creating three levels of integration experiences. The first is an all-Pershing system, designed for advisors and firms that don't want to worry about licensing software from multiple third-party vendors. The second is a multiple portal view, which brings in data from third-party systems that advisors may have already purchased for CRM or financial planning via Pershing's recently launched API Store, a facility to enable tight integrations with Pershing's systems and third party apps. The third portal is a custom portal, which allows typically larger firms to control the entire advisor experience by integrating with a customized technology stack that the firm has designed or built.
"The intent of the Integrated Wealth Experience is to deliver flexibility, choice and a foundation for integrating Pershing's systems or a third party's or a custom version," Nagappan noted.
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