Reimagining the Client-Advisor Experience

TL;DR

• Wealth tech tools are “good enough” but not great.
• Disjointed portals and communication channels create a frustrating experience for clients, weakening the advisor-client relationship.
• The CRM shouldn’t be the hub—engagement should. Advisors and clients need a unified platform for seamless interaction.
• The future is intelligent experiences: Tools that anticipate needs, adapt to workflows, and deepen the advisor-client relationship through seamless, personalized interactions.

Advisors work with clients daily, guiding them through complex decisions and financial uncertainty. Yet the client experience is often undermined by the broken ecosystem advisors are forced to use. Advisors focus on delivering advice and building trust, but their efforts are lost in systems that fail to effectively capture the value for their clients. Today we’ll be diving into the client experience and how the tech stack is not structured to serve advisors and their clients.

Onboarding a new client typically goes something like this:

1. Introductory Meeting: A discovery session where advisors learn about the client’s goals, pain points, and financial situation. This sets the stage for future engagements.
2. Data Collection: After the meeting, documents are collected—either manually or through onboarding tools. The information is then pushed into the advisor’s CRM and financial planning software.
3. Plan Presentation Meeting: The first planning meeting establishes a “baseline” of the client’s current financial status. Advisors present recommendations and outline next steps.
4. Implementation: If the client moves forward, more information is gathered, accounts are opened, and recommendations begin to be implemented.
5. Ongoing engagement: Rinse and repeat based on the meeting frequency, client goals, and planning objectives.

Is that overly simplified? Yes. But it’s the fundamental framework used across the industry. The problem lies in the details: data gathering and organization are critical to the long-term success of the relationship, yet they’re often mishandled.

The wealth tech stack understands this; products have emerged to streamline onboarding, transcribe meeting notes, and some are beginning to scan & synthesize documents. Companies like PreciseFP and others make onboarding new clients into the current broken system easier! Haha. I love the intention towards hassle-free, efficient data gathering. It’s a small step in the right direction.

Think of these onboarding tools as an on-ramp to a highway—they help you get started, but they don’t eliminate the congestion once you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Onboarding tools make it easier to collect data, but once advisors have the data, they still have to sift through it manually. Efforts to “streamline” the onboarding process aren’t bad. They’re good enough to provide the advisor with just enough value to get the job done. And that explains most of the tools advisors use today.

The “Good Enough” Problem in Wealth Tech

Most wealth tech products are “good enough” today—and they stop there. They stop at the point before being so good that they’d make advisors’ lives better. Here’s a great article on why that may be the case (visualized below).

“If we took a more craftsman like view of software, we would realize that a chair is not 80% done when you can sit on it. It’s the details and the polish that make something worthy of use. So while from a utilitarian standpoint something may have most of the features a person might ask for, from a humanist point of view 20% of the work still only produces 20% of the results.” – Bobby Lockhart

Advisors are flexible and need to meet their clients where they’re at. Current products don’t bend and flex as advisors do—they’re good enough, but not great. For example, current CRMs for the most part are off the shelf items. They’re customizable to a degree, but they’re not designed to adapt to the unique needs of every advisor or client. CRMs try to do too much and accomplish very little. They flex in some areas, but not in others. This rigidity forces advisors to build workarounds, which creates inefficiencies and frustration.

The Fragmented Client Experience

Clients feel the pain too. Their experience mirrors the fragmentation advisors face. Imagine this: a client portal for financial planning, another for investments, and email for advisor communication. Advisors deal with the pain points and force their clients to as well. This disjointed experience undermines trust and retention. In a world where we expect instant answers and seamless interactions, the wealth tech stack falls short.

Advisors who fail to adopt better technology risk losing clients to those who do. The industry is at a breaking point where technology can—and must—be enhanced to provide better experiences for both advisors and clients.

Rethinking the Tech Stack: Engagement at the Core

The current tech stack is not structured to serve the advisors and their clients. It’s built with the CRM at the core, serving as the hub for all operating processes. But this approach is flawed. While integrating into the CRM is the easiest way for new products to scale, it results in tools that are more so features than stand-alone products. Advisory teams are forced to build processes around the CRM, not the client.

What if we flipped the script? Instead of the CRM being the hub, what if client engagement was at the center? Clients are always at the heart of advisory relationships, so shouldn’t the tech stack reflect that?

Clients are the center of engagement for advisors. But our current workflows are not designed with the client first. We’ve cobbled together a tech stack that is good but not great. It makes sense to build towards a future where clients and advisors can engage in one place. Of course, different points of view would be needed: a detailed view for advisors (the backend) and a simple view for clients (the frontend). Regardless, they both share the underlying data needed to run both systems.

Today, advisors operate out of the CRM and go to each individual tool to complete the necessary work. Current wealth tech tools are integrating and building out the backend (advisor experience). The goal is to de-operationalize the advisor, allowing them to focus on the client. But they all seem to ignore the frontend (client experience). You can’t have one without the other; the advisor and the client are collectively one. The industry should consider moving towards an ecosystem with the CRM as the database, and a future where a new operating system connects advisors and clients.

This future isn’t about creating an all-in-one solution. Competition is essential for developing best-in-class products. Instead, it’s about building an ecosystem where best-in-class products work together seamlessly, with engagement as the focal point. In the previous blog post I mentioned that integration is the first step to data consolidation. We are at the beginning of a complex and challenging road ahead. Here is how I envision the future:

1. Integration: Tools for client and advisor engagement will be seamlessly connected, creating a unified ecosystem (dashed lines above).
2. CRM as a Database: CRMs will evolve from being the hub to serving as a robust database. They’ll house all client data, but with improved data extraction and search capabilities (white boxes above).
3. Engagement at the Core: A new operating system will be built with client-advisor engagement at its heart. Imagine a single platform where communication, goal sharing, task management, and financial planning all happen in one place (gray and purple boxes above).

Advisors and clients are collectively one. There’s no advisor without the client, and vice versa. Technology must bridge the gap between them, making it easy for both parties to access and visualize each other’s contributions. In practical terms, this means:

• For Advisors: All of the client information at your fingertips allowing you to focus on building relationships.
• For Clients: A unified, intuitive experience that fosters trust and transparency.

It’s time to move beyond “good enough” and build tools that truly enhance the advisor-client relationship. As software becomes commoditized, the next frontier of differentiation will be building out “intelligent experiences” built on top of readily available software, focusing on highly customizable user interfaces, complex data analysis, and seamless integration. Here’s what it means for wealth tech: the tools we use today will become embedded in the background, allowing us to interact on a single platform with insights at our fingertips. This is the future advisors and clients deserve.

If you want to help me build this or know of others building this, let’s talk.

Advisors: I’d love to understand how you operate—are you open to taking a brief survey to help develop our research? (5 minutes max). The goal is to identify the areas where your current tech stack is creating friction and reducing efficiency in your workflows.

-Erik