LPL to Invest More Than $1.3B in Tech, Other Key Areas This Year

"Twenty years ago, there were two ways to take coffee: Caffeinated and decaffeinated," Steinmeier said. Then along came flavored creamers and then the many ingredients you can add to coffee at Starbucks, he said, calling it "uber-personalization" that allows it to potentially "make a unique drink for every single person on earth."

"It's our belief that the same type of flexibility and personalization is just as important to our advisors and historically the industry has never given advisors a model with exactly what they needed," Arnold went on to say. "There were always tradeoffs to be made. So the objective of the personalization layer is for advisors to no longer have to compromise because you can have the ongoing flexibility and optionality to match your business now and in the future."

Other Focus Areas

Over the course of 2021, LPL will also "build capabilities to support your high-net-worth clients, including introducing investment banking referrals, enhanced product and lending capabilities and specialized advice support," Steinmeier told advisors.

Another area in which LPL is "making material changes is the building of support for multi-custodial practices," Steinmeier said. "We recognize that personalization also comes in building more flexible workflows to allow you to structure your practice how you'd like it to operate. And so we're building more flexibility in those workflows to support assets that your custody both with LPL and away from LPL: a multi-custodial solution to help you simplify your operating environment."

The company wants advisors to tell it where they want more personalization, he added.

The modern consumer, now more than ever, "wants things that are easy to use, that are convenient: things like on-demand, personalized experiences that are on their terms," according to Burt White, chief investment officer, investments and investor solutions. "It's what I like to call the three WEs: "Wherever, whenever and whatever they need," he said.

Another key area of focus for LPL, meanwhile, "continues to be on building out our advisory platforms," White said.

Of the recently introduced Meeting Manager tool, Ed Fandrey, managing director of Advisor Solutions, said: "We're getting some early feedback that this tool allows meetings that normally took almost eight hours to prepare for" to only take "as little as one hour" to prep for. It is integrated into LPL's ClientWorks advisor platform at no additional cost, he noted.

Pictured: Dan Arnold, LPL CEO and president