Page 13 - Investment Advisor March 2022

ly increase capacity in advisory firms. tivity and improving the advisor and OTHER APPLICATIONS
Consider client meetings as an example. client experience. Another area where AI is having an
Advisors often have hundreds of client As an interesting aside, despite initial impact in modern advisor technology is
meetings in a year, and just schedul- concerns about working with a robot in in the ability to analyze tax returns and
ing, confirming and preparing for those the background, early experience has financial plans to suggest the next best
meetings can bog down advisors and shown that clients are not put off by action for an advisor to take. By scanning
their staff on a daily basis. these electronic communications. In fact, these documents, AI applications can
By combining AI and NLP, virtual many advisors using virtual assistants proactively identify planning and invest-
assistants (e.g., your own Siri or Alexa!) via business support systems report that ing opportunities through powerful algo-
can be programmed to automatically most people these days abhor phone calls rithms, saving advisors hours of time per
check the firm’s CRM for upcoming and prefer scheduling in this manner. client analyzing client scenarios to come
meetings, send an advance up with optimal recommenda-
digital communication out Leveraging AI and advanced tions, while automatically illus-
to the client (either email or trating planning solutions and
text) to coordinate, confirm technologies to orchestrate generating proposals.
and get the meeting sched- And for those M&A-hungry
uled on the advisor’s calendar the advisor’s tech stack with firms, RPA shows much prom-
without any staff involved. their custodian and broker- ise to simplify and streamline
From there, the vir- the tasks of transferring large
tual assistant can integrate dealer account data enables amounts of data from one sys-
with the financial planning, tem to another after an acquisi-
reporting systems and custo- firms to automate many time- tion, such as from the selling
dian/broker-dealer account consuming workflows and holds firm’s CRM to the buyers. All
data to automatically pre- you have to do is train an RPA
pare the information for the much promise — with the good bot once in a workflow automa-
client discussion by provid- tion platform to copy and paste
ing a complete package for news that business support data from one field to anoth-
the advisor to have before systems are available today. er and then turn it loose on
the meeting. the hundreds or thousands of
accounts acquired, and the job
BUSINESS SUPPORT SYSTEMS Another application of these new is done quickly and accurately with no
The concept here is a new category technologies is in capturing “unstruc- human intervention required. What once
of wealth management technology tured data” and being able to process took weeks can now be done in minutes.
known as “business support systems.” it in various applications. When data Just as Justin Timberlake trans-
Leveraging AI and advanced technolo- resides in electronic forms or spread- formed himself from just another ex-
gies to orchestrate the advisor’s tech sheets, it is relatively straightforward boy band member into a solo superstar
stack with their custodian and broker- to capture this data and process it. But with the critically acclaimed hit single
dealer account data enables firms to when data is in unstructured documents “SexyBack,” so too can advisors reju-
automate many time-consuming work- such as letters, contracts or PDFs, it venate their firms with these new
flows and holds much promise — with can be challenging to automate, creating AI-driven technologies.
the good news that business support manual workarounds. So, let’s make 2022 the year you let
systems are available today and not in Particularly for the alternative AI do the busywork, so you can do the
some metaverse future. investment space, much of the informa- human work and bring the sexy back to
Other similar use cases for business tion advisors need for reporting, track- your business.
support systems include new account ing and analyzing lies in static PDF
opening, prospect nurturing and com- documents. AI and ML can be a pow- Timothy D. Welsh, CFP, is president, CEO and
pliance reviews. These workflow erful tool for enabling intelligent data founder of Nexus Strategy LLC, a consulting
Adobe Stock thousands of hours every year, dramati- in a digital and workflow-automation- firm to the wealth management industry. He
extraction and being able to produce it
automation processes can save firms
can be reached at [email protected] or
cally increasing capacity and produc-
friendly format.
on Twitter @NexusStrategy.
MARCH 2022 INVESTMENT ADVISOR 11