For Charles Reiling, the question isn’t if tech will be a priority for his firm in the coming year. Long a top priority, the question for Reiling’s firm is what will stand out enough for investment.
“We’re constantly looking at tech. And it’s constantly changing,” said Reiling, CEO of the Delaware-based independent broker-dealer and RIA platform CoastalOne. “But we really focus on a couple of things when we’re evaluating technology. Primarily, is it going to make us and our advisors more efficient? That’s the primary consideration for us. Is this going to improve everybody’s daily lives? In some cases, that might be the same tech for both the firm and for the advisors. And in some cases, it may be different.
“But the key consideration is how is this going to make things better, smoother, give us better reporting, give us better insight, make the advisors’ lives easier, improve workflows, add accounts, to improve the relationship with clients.”
That sentiment is shared by James Bogart, CEO and president of the McLean, Virginia-based financial planning firm Bogart Wealth. He said while the growth his organization has experienced in recent years is worth celebrating, the need to scale up creates gaps that only wealthtech can fill.
“It’s been important, and it’s becoming even more important. I think the biggest struggle my firm is having is still around staff and staffing capacity. I think that’s the same case with pretty much everybody, honestly,” Bogart said. “But what I’ve been doing in response to that is finding more ways to be as efficient as possible. My team knows I look for the one-plus-one-equals-three-type scenario, because I really do want to find those leverage points. So technology, for us, has been that way of really finding more productivity and more efficiency. And I believe that that’s going to become more and more and more important.”
With that importance rising as quickly as customer and client expectations, the ongoing pandemic-fueled shift from physical to digital in financial services means getting it right with tech in 2023 is more crucial than it has ever been.
So how are wealth managers looking to level up over the next 12 months?
New research conducted by Arizent, Financial Planning’s parent company, takes a look at the priorities and attitudes that will dictate the tech agenda across financial services for the rest of the year. More specifically, the study explores the strategic goals shaping today’s approach, the effectiveness of firms at aligning technology investments to advance those goals, the role of fintechs and sentiment around transformational technologies.
This research was conducted online in December 2022 among 525 respondents with knowledge of or involvement in their organization’s tech initiatives across financial services. By sector, the research reports on views from 191 respondents from the wealth management industry, 164 banking respondents, 83 from insurance and 87 from mortgage firms.
Scroll down to see some key wealth management takeaways from the research. The entire analysis can be found here.