In a keynote on Wednesday that kicked off the first in-person Envestnet Advisor Summit since 2019, Envestnet CEO Bill Crager offered an upbeat take on how advisors will be able to harness technology to strengthen their relationships with their clients, all part of what he called the "Intelligent Financial Life."
Envestnet also introduced a new cloud service for advisors this week, he told attendees in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Crager praised the way the industry responded to challenges brought on by the pandemic over the past couple of years. "Our industry made a huge difference in people's lives and made a huge stride forward during these years," he said, adding: "The stage is set for what's next."
He pointed out that the last time Envestnet, advisors and other attendees were all together was in May 2019, at the Envestnet Advisor Summit in Austin, Texas.
"Our theme that year was leadership. If you recall, Colin Powell stood on the stage [and] spoke about Winston Churchill," Crager noted. Since then, both Powell and Jud Bergman, Envestnet's former CEO, died — a fact likely not lost on any attendees and, along with a mention of the millions of people who died of COVID-19, lending a somber note to the otherwise upbeat keynote.
"It goes without saying that over these last couple of years, some weird sh… stuff has gone down," he said, drawing laughs from attendees who knew exactly what word he intended to say before saying stuff instead.
COVID vaccines "miraculously" arrived over a year ago and there is still "uncertainty in our lives" due to new issues including Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he noted.
"But here's the thing," he said. "Throughout human time, despite twists and turns, we're here." Just as humans have done in reaction to other major challenges, he said: "We react. We adapt …. What enables us to survive and adapt is our human nature. As William Faulkner said, it is the human spirit that is capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
However, "there's something more that keeps us moving forward when that human spirit is connected to other people," he said, adding that, when that happens, "we don't merely exist; we thrive." People "connected to science and technology that has exponential scale" allows us to "expand [and] create transforming progress [and] this is where we are" now, he added.
And "the world is changing right here in this hall this week" at the Summit, he said, noting "the ways you do business have changed quite a bit" in recent years.
"It's not technology or data that matter," he said. "It's you using technology and data that matter. We embrace tech. But we don't want to become technology. We're people, and people are the things that matter."
The new tech tools being demonstrated by Envestnet to advisors this week represent a "future that we've been building towards for a number of years — many years," he added.
What's New
The new Envestnet Wealth Data Platform cloud service can aggregate all of an advisor's data, Crager said.
"We enrich it. We reconcile it. We publish the data back to all of your systems, whether they're Envestnet systems or not," he told attendees. "And we power the entire Envestnet ecosystem with this data, all helping you with actionable insights each and every day."
