Ram Nagappan, Pershing LLC's chief information officer, is something of a visionary.
Not only does he love technology for technology's sake --- he gets positively giddy showing off new things --- he loves applying it to improve business processes.
And that is exactly what he has on display this week at Pershing's annual Insite conference being held adjacent to the clouded over windswept beach here in Ft. Lauderdale. While tropical depression (or perhaps storm by now) Andrea is spinning away in the Gulf of Mexico and making the weather outside uninviting advisers are flocking to Pershing's Interactive Solutions Center.
Standing at the "Flexible Technology Kiosks" advisers were able to test drive demonstration versions of the second generation of Pershing's NetX360 mobile platform that I first wrote about in April.
These were not tied to a fully functioning backend data warehouse but nonetheless showcased the attractive, highly intuitive front-end interface design advisers should gain access to in the coming months. The interface was running on a variety of tablet devices including Apple's iPad but perhaps more impressively on several different devices running Microsoft's latest mobile operating systems. Included among them were a Surface tablet, Surface Pro and Windows 8 tablet model from Samsung.
"I had an iPad that I used at work but have since bought a Surface and am pretty excited at the prospect of this becoming available," said John Walsh, a regional branch manager with Capitol Securities Management Inc.
"It would really be great to have access not only to the NetX360 platform but also all my Microsoft Office applications right there on one very portable and powerful device," he said.
Mr. Nagappan pointed out another advantage to the Microsoft devices that is often lost on advisers who have become enamored of their iPads.
Microsoft's Surface Pro and RT devices can run multiple tasks at once that can be left running in their own tabs. This is something iPads for all their good looks and responsiveness are incapable of at present.
AROUND THE CORNER
Both literally and figuratively speaking, what had Mr. Nagappan most excited were things around the corner from the "flexible" kiosks.
That is where he had set up Pershing's Advanced Technology Labs.
Standing in front of two big-screen displays and decked out in a portable headset was Joseph Pasion, a vice president in Pershing's retail services unit.
At Mr. Nagappan's behest he launched into the first of two demonstrations of working futuristic technology that many advisers I know would go gaga over -- specifically, voice biometrics and natural language processing.
Mr. Nagappan excitedly said he liked to refer to it informally and colloquially as Okay NetX360 alluding to Google's recently announced "Okay" natural language platform that the search engine giant showed off at its own annual convention for developers called
Google IO.
The initial demonstration was of a scenario that is probably quite common for some busy advisers on the go: Accessing their account management system on their smart phone.
Only in this case the implementation was hands-free and voice-enabled. So to illustrate, lets say an adviser just took a typical hands-free voice call from his client inquiring about something related to his or her accounts.
Today and adviser would next have to hangup telling the client he was on the road and would check on it.
If it was an emergency the adviser would pull off the road and then turn his visual attention to the device, launching an app, typing in a password, perhaps having to use a second form of authentication.
In our futuristic demonstration, again actually running, Mr. Pasion playing the part of the adviser simply spoke into his headset "Open NetX360," he said.
Next, with his smart phone screen projected onto the bigscreen display, the application window opened and a voice responded asking him what he wanted.
One thing you might have missed initially (I did) was the secure granting of access to the platform (well, the demo server anyway in this case). "We used voice biometrics," said Mr. Nagappan. So the system recognized certain key characteristics of Mr. Pasions voice, unique features that it would be difficult to duplicate without recording him surreptitiously.
That in turn allowed immediate access to the system without additional manual input.Next came the query addressing the client's question, which in this case related to shares of Apple stock held.
Mr. Pasion went a step further next asking how many clients had more than a certain threshold of Apple stocks in their portfolios. "Twelve clients are holding more than 200 shares of Apple," came the system's verbal response.
And remember in our typical day-to-day adviser scenario this would all be hands-free without the need to pull over to the side of the road.
"Siri cannot do this yet, she simply does not understand the financial services context specific to such a query," Mr. Nagappan said.
He went on to explain that Pershing is working with a third-party firm that specializes in this particular type of development work (he could not yet disclose the name of that company).
In a nutshell, the work ahead was continuing to teach Pershing's system the financial grammar necessary to interact readily with most of the typical repetoire found in an adviser's day-to-day lexicon.
Voice biometrics and natural language processing were but the first two of four forward-looking technologies Pershing's technology folks are at work on.
The next two, which admittedly are a bit more pie-in-the-sky Mr. Nagappan said at this point are augmented reality ("connecting the physical to the digital" as he defined it in brief) and autovizualiation of data.
Even in its most preliminary state the demonstation nevertheless presented a paradigm shift in the way advisers might one day be able to visualize, manipulate and study their data to correlate it with pragmatic business decisions.
My favorite of the visualizations shown allowed me to view an adviser's interactions with his clients on the screen both in terms of number and frequency of visits as well as with various of the clients' own demographics overlaid.
Patrick Yip, director of advisory market technology strategy who was helping me inerpret what I was seeing lent some context.
"You seen the small red circle in the upper left corner, that is a client you had a lot of interactions with over the last six months but who represents a very small part of your overall book in terms of AUM," he said.
Mr. Yip went a step further to point out that not only were his or her actual discretionary account assets low but that he had few held away assets that the adviser might be able to bring in whereas other clients did.
"So perhaps you [as the adviser] might want to reduce your time spent on this client and put additional time toward one of your other clients," said Mr. Yip.
Again, the significance here is being able to see all this data displayed on a single screen that has multiple points of context --- not different pages or chars of a report or canned report --- but real time context easily seen from a future NetX360 dashboard.
And there was additional entertaining video mockups too. For instance a point-of-view projection of what a cycling adviser might see through Google Glass (or a future wearable technology competitor) while on a ride.
Flashing up on the screen with the greenery in the background was a visually transparent alert that flashed regarding an emergency shortfall in a client account. "The data behind Albridge Wealth Management is going to be one of the key areas where we explore this technology," Mr. Nagappan said, referring to another unit of Pershing that is used by a very large number of independent broker-dealers and their registered rep and wealth management workforce's.
I later ran into a long-time technology source and industry leader, Dan Skiles, who currently oversees technology for the small boutique custodian Shareholder Services Group. His firm uses much of Pershing's platform for back office processing.
He had also been privy to a demonstration of the technology I was shown. "I can absolutely imagine an adviser using the voice system," he said.
When asked whether he thought the various technologies could all be brought to fruition he paused momentarily before replying. "You know big companies like safe bets but they are allowing Ram to try these things and are saying 'here's something bold, let's go for it'," Mr. Skiles said.
