To better equip financial advisors to interact real-time with their wealth management clients, Microsoft AppSource is now offering NexJ’s Inform solution. Inform, a product in NexJ's Nudge-AI Suite, enables financial advisors to engage with their clients using news and content highly personalized to the client’s specific interests. NexJ uses a sophisticated AI engine to match client interests to news from wealth management-specific premium news feeds, including 15,000 publicly available news streams such as the Harvard Business Review and Barron’s, as well as a firm’s own research.

There are thousands of companies and products that market themselves as Customer Relationship Management solutions, ranging from industry behemoths to tiny niche products. Given the importance of relationships to financial advisors, it’s no surprise advisory and wealth management firms think they need a CRM system. But is that really what they need?

We were lucky enough to sit down with April Rudin, Founder and President of The Rudin Group, Aawad Aamir, Analyst with Celent, and Andrew Cant, VP of Financial Services Solutions at NexJ Systems, about what truly improves the advisor experience. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the future of advisor efficiency, the current state of next best action, and how firms can implement tools to help advisors be at the top of their game.

Needless to say, the pandemic has upended the advisor / client relationship like no other event in our lifetimes. How, where and why financial advisors engage with their clients looks very, very different than it did pre-COVID. From Zoom meetings to virtual events to AI-driven online dashboards, clients have become accustomed to a very different way of working with their advisors … and frankly expecting much more.

Think about the volume of data you have at your fingertips. Investment research. Macroeconomic reports. “Social signals” from your clients. Now, how well do you feel you are able to bring all that data together, real time, to the benefit of your clients? Daunting, isn’t it?

“Money in motion.” It’s a phrase many advisors are familiar with. However, to capture that money is easier said than done.

Not only must advisors be clued into money in motion events, such as a client getting married (or divorced), having a child, inheriting money, selling a business, or changing careers or getting promoted, but they must be able to access that intelligence in real time with actionable ways to capitalize on the opportunities presented.

Wealth managers have talked about “personalization” and “client-centricity” for years. But is that actually how clients feel about the service they receive, or does it sound to them like more marketing speak?

Artificial intelligence (AI) in wealth management is no longer a cutting-edge technology. Many firms now claim to leverage AI within their CRM systems. However, despite its broad adoption, the targeted application of AI toward very specific advisor needs remains a lofty, unrealized goal for too many wealth managers. In other words, AI needs to be practical and solve specific problems for it to drive efficiency and enhance the client experience.

The wealth management industry has undergone a tremendous level of change in the past two years, driven by COVID-related forces, changing consumer expectations, and technological advances. The customer relationship management (CRM) market for wealth management is fighting to stay abreast of these trends and deliver the kinds of useful insights and time-saving efficiency advisors need to succeed. 

CRM is a bit of a catch-all term these days. Originally, meant as a way of centralizing all of your relationship interactions with your client. As technology and the industry advanced so did the buzzwords and trends. Add the evolution of vertical industry-specific CRM and you have an umbrella of terms and features that obscures what a CRM, let alone a CRM built for Wealth Management is. So, what exactly makes a Wealth Management focused CRM? 

In July, Celent awarded NexJ the highest Advanced Technology score among all the wealth management CRM platforms they evaluated for their 2021 report. This was not the first time NexJ has been acknowledged for its superior technology – Aite-Novarica Group also recently recognized NexJ as best in class.  We are grateful for this acknowledgment, which further explains why leading wealth mangers including UBS, Wells Fargo, and RBC selected NexJ to be the core of their advisor desktop.   

Communication is key when it comes to building a relationship between wealth managers and clients, but how do you keep a consistent approach?