Pepper the robot with two attendees at the National LINC conference in San Diego. (© LILA PHOTO for TD Ameritrade Institutional)
Vijay Sankaran is on a mission: not only to foster innovative ideas at TD Ameritrade, where he serves as chief information officer, but to engineer those ideas into useful products for the advisors who custody at TD Ameritrade Institutional.
That goal was the genesis of the innovation center that he leads in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with 200 people in Michigan and employees now in other TD Ameritrade offices in St. Louis and Chicago. The center, says Sankaran, has grown into a product developer. While the group continues to create gee-whiz tech devices like Pepper the robot and the holograph machine on display at TD Ameritrade Institutional's annual LINC conference for RIAs in San Diego, it's also been able to quickly turn ideas into usable products.
That's the case with three product introductions at LINC, all of which have been helped by a focus on agile software development at TD Ameritrade since Sankaran became CIO in 2016.
The first are two Amazon Alexa 'skills' for advisors: one is a voice-activated briefing that provides advisors with practice management insights and technology tips; the other allows clients of RIAs who custody with TD Ameritrade Institutional to check their account balances, positions and quotes, along with requesting market updates, all by using the virtual assistant's voice command features. Those products took four months from idea to market, Sankaran reports.
A similar Alexa offering for retail TD Ameritrade clients was rolled out last October.
The second rollout at the LINC conference that began life at the innovation center is a completely redesigned version of AdvisorClient.com, the portal site for clients of advisors who custody with TD Ameritrade Institutional. There are mobile AdvisorClient apps for Android and Apple, too, and the site was built with a typical TD open architecture to allow integrations with third-party technologies. That development, says Sankaran, took six months from idea to market, thanks to its agile chops.
