Merrill Lynch office. (Photo: AP)
Merrill Lynch Wealth Management further expanded its growing number of digital platforms with Socialize, a new "intelligent content sharing platform" that it launched in early July for iPhones and iPads, as well as desktop computers, according to Kabir Sethi, managing director of the company's Global Wealth & Investment Management division and head of Digital Wealth Management.
About 150 Merrill Lynch advisors are using Socialize now, "but we're going to ramp up the number quickly," he told ThinkAdvisor on Friday. Like any digital platform the company launches, it's starting with just a small group of its advisors initially before rolling it out more widely.
The company has also expanded it to Android devices, he said. "In the next few months, this will get to everyone," he said, referring to the firm's 15,000 or so advisors.
Socialize addresses the need of advisors to share content across multiple devices, he said, explaining advisors can select what topics of interest they have and what kind of content they want to see — such as machine learning, retirement or tax reform — and "then you get served up articles" that fit those areas of interest. Advisors can then press a button to share the content with other LinkedIn users, he said. Advisors can also schedule posts to be sent at specific times, he said.
Using a form of artificial intelligence, the platform then, "over time … gives you analytics around clicks and views for each article and, based on how people are viewing articles and which ones are more popular, the system automatically adjusts your topics of interest" to figure out what content to serve the user, he explained.
