Key Points

• A pivot to holistic advice offers advisors the ability to deepen their understanding of their clients’ concerns and identify additional solutions that can substantially improve clients’ outcomes, thereby creating a mutually beneficial feedback loop.
  
  
• Technology will transform the basis of advisory relationships from being centered on accounts and products to being focused on managing progress from the clients’ perspective. Clients’ most valued aspect of their wealth management experience is personalized advice from a trusted partner.
  
  
• The most addressable opportunity to free advisor time is the creation of workflows to delegate standardized procedures within an advisory practice.
  
  
• By providing extensive portfolio guidance options through a robust unified managed account (UMA) platform, firms are able to share their established best practices while allowing discretion to remain at the practice level.

Key Implications

• Instead of existing at distinct points along a digital-tohuman-advice continuum, provider firms will need to offer platforms that allow their advisors and clients to choose which parts of their relationships will be digitally enabled.
  
  
• By optimizing platforms to assume or streamline managerial and process-driven activities, firms can more than double the time advisors are able to spend on their most valuable functions.
  
  
• To maximize their value, integrated wealth management platforms must be designed with the goal of improving workflows from day one, but also with built-in capacities to be developed to address evolving client needs.
  
  
• By showcasing successful use cases, firms can create an incentive for practices that experience the same challenges to devote resources to engaging with the new platform. With enough momentum, the platform should become the core delivery element of the firm’s client service model, and, ultimately, its culture.