What factors influence an RIA's selection process when choosing digital tools for wealth dashboarding and client experience?

Let's talk about why RIAs choose these tools. Typically, an advisor is going to look at it as, "Hey, what are the jobs I need to do?" These start with financial planning—that's future retirement planning, cash flow planning, and answering clients’ questions like “Do I have enough money to buy a house?” Then there’s the risk management piece: what is the investment mix I should have based on the client's risk? There’s reporting: how can I show my clients how things are going? And there’s billing: how can I charge my clients? These are all just the ongoing tasks. Then there's the other front-end piece: how do I prospect and find new clients? How do I handle the sales calls and reach them with marketing? Then there’s the onboarding itself, which includes account openings, custodial transfers, and collecting all the pertinent information.

So there are the pre-sale, post-sale and ongoing pieces. Breaking those down, advisors can pick and choose the software if it exists in each of those categories and assemble their own tech stack. Why don't all RIAs do this? It turns out that very few think from a technology-first perspective and go piece together these eight pieces of software that'll take care of every single element here. It's rare to find someone that has put together the entire stack. 

Moreover, if an advisor does assemble the stack, now they have to manage eight pieces of software that don't necessarily talk to one another, so they're constantly switching between them and copying data from one to the other. One advisor told me they spent 40% of their time not in front of clients, but instead moving data from one tool to another—transforming it in some way in Excel, copying it over there, then doing it in some other form. Each software generates 90-page PDFs that are supposed to be client-friendly, but no client wants that—they want three bullet points—so then advisors have to spend time shrinking that down into a 10-page document and come up with the TL;DR bullet points on their own. 

We believe that technology could be the glue between these pieces and prevent advisors from having to think about managing all these pieces of the stack—just use one frontend. We can do all the data transformation and consolidation of the information, so that all the advisor has to do is click a button, get one PDF with the most salient points, and present it to the client.