The smell of fresh-cut grass is wafting through the Florida breeze and thousands of people are escaping winter storms around the country to head to the Sunshine State, which can only mean one thing.
The wealth management fintech conference season is back, of course! Oh, yikes, did that sound like the beginning of a clichéd article about baseball spring training?
This is InvestmentNews, you’re here to read about the wealth management industry, and over the next month, thousands of financial advisors will travel to Florida to learn about the latest technology and how it can improve their practice. This week was the Ascent conference from Orion Advisor Solutions, which has quickly grown into one of the industry’s most significant providers of tech and turnkey asset management solutions. On March 13, Technology Tools for Today , the longest running advisor fintech event, will kick off in Tampa Bay.
All-in-one platforms, personalization and retirement income technology were the topics du jour in 2022. What can advisors expect this year?
I asked some folks who attend a lot of conferences what they think, or hope, will be this year’s most talked about subjects. I also asked them what subjects should get less stage time, or what will just take a less prominent role compared to years past. Here are some themes that rose to the top.
This should probably come as no surprise to anyone following the news. Interest in artificial intelligence has exploded thanks to breakthroughs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Commercial applications are coming soon. Microsoft already has OpenAI powering its new Bing search engine and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it’s working with Morgan Stanley on adapting the technology for advisors.
This buzz, combined with the industry’s efforts to provide personalization at scale, should mean conference attendees hear a lot about predictive technology, said Shawna Ohm, founder of Content 151, a content marketing firm for financial advisors.
“It’s been around for a while and it’s the easiest way for providers to look like they’re on top of the latest and greatest,” Ohm said.
Some, like Three Crowns Copywriting and Marketing founder and CEO Johnny Sandquist, hope AI, especially natural language processing, will be a focus at upcoming events. And some advisors, like WH Cornerstone Investments co-founder Bill Harris, would like to see AI that can catapult growth without adding lots of new staff.
Those expectations already played out at this week at the Ascent conference, where Orion CEO Eric Clarke announced a new integration between ChatGPT and Redtail Speak, the compliant client texting platform offered through Redtail CRM, that lets the artificial intelligence analyze conversations and suggest responses.
Companies will undoubtedly be looking to ride the wave of public interest in AI to generate interest in their products, but beware of vaporware. That’s tech speak for software that has been announced and advertised but is either still a concept or not yet fully built.
“Get ready for a ridiculous amount of ‘we have AI features [or] ChatGPT integrations’ that serve no real purpose beyond sounding buzzy,” XY Planning Network co-founder Michael Kitces, who attends more conferences than perhaps anyone in the business, said in a message.
His business partner, Alan Moore, agreed, writing on Twitter that he would like to see, “Fewer firms saying they use AI when AI doesn’t actually exist.”
Perhaps the most surprising answer I received was Kitces saying he expects digital onboarding to receive somewhat less stage time at fintech conferences this year. Despite being a staple of the pitches made to advisors by fintech companies for several years, digital onboarding is now the portion of Kitces’ infamous AdvisorTech Map that’s shrinking the most.
“Advisors didn’t want to pay for onboarding tools, they expect their custodial/B-D platforms to include them,” Kitces said in a direct message. “Now that most have upgraded, the whole category is vanishing.”
“User experience” is one of those things that everyone agrees should be better, although they have a hard time nailing down exactly what “better” means. Demonstrating concrete improvements could be a major theme of 2023 fintech conferences.
While improvements have been made on client-facing portals, the technology advisors use in the office is often still behind the times. The highly touted “open API” platforms and overlay dashboards that were so popular a few years ago still haven’t brought advisors to the promised land of a truly integrated tech stack.
“The industry has sold the concept of ‘integrated technology,’ and not delivered it. At all. At best, single sign-on has been the solution for advisors,” said Amit Dogra, president and chief operating officer of tru Independence, a firm that provides tech and services to breakaway advisors. “Advisors want a single source code, intuitive technology, that is seamless and is not patchwork technology.”
Sandquist echoed this, saying that he’s hoping not to see single sign-on capabilities touted as integrations and that there will be proof that user interfaces are getting better than the status quo.
Ohm just hopes to never hear the phrase “seamless integration” ever again.
“Not because it’s a bad thing — I love a seamless integration,” she said. “It’s just that the phrase is so overused, it’s stopped having any meaning. I’d like to see providers say what they really mean by that. Especially since we seem to be in an era of streamlining.”
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