Successful financial advisors have to live in two worlds: They need excellent strategic awareness of their entire book of business and macro-trends in the markets and industry, while at the same time maintaining personal relationships with each of their many clients and translating those macro-trends into meaningful action for unique individuals.

Timely and relevant client engagement has never been more important in the wealth management industry than it is today. The last couple of years have upended expectations for advisors and clients alike. The ability to engage in real-time, highly personalized interactions on topics hyper relevant to clients is now table stakes for advisors and the firms they work for.

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many a financial firms’ upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity right from the onset. So, how do you sort out the fluff from the legitimate ones? 

More and more wealth management firms are beginning to recognize that the ability to understand a customer better, based upon an understanding of individual likes and dislikes, enables them to offer solutions tailor-made for specific needs. This leads to product differentiation, deeper client engagement and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

In the anatomy of a financial services organization, software is the circulatory system. It picks up the data in the brain, or database, and delivers it to where it's needed. It connects all the parts of the body together and ensures the body is working well as a single entity.  
 
So, when a system stops receiving support, it affects the health of the entire company. It can become expensive to maintain, difficult to upgrade, or so obsolete it risks pulling the company behind the competition. When people can’t or aren’t using the system, or when the system isn’t able to provide the functionality that’s needed, the organization must replace it. 

From an advisor’s point of view, not all investors are created equal – in addition to the obvious differences in assets, age, employment and lifestyle, different people have different levels of receptivity to the advice and assistance an advisor can provide. At the same time, an investor’s position is not fixed: It changes with time and in response to outside influences. So how can an advisor best tailor the experience they provide to each unique and evolving individual, multiplied by the size of the advisor’s book?

Looking for a CRM to meet your needs, but struggling to identify what features your advisors will actually use? Learn what a CRM truly made for wealth management means. Boost your advisors productivity by giving them the ability to view households and spheres of influence, the chance to engage them with personalized content and ultimately engage them at the right time with next best actions.  

Artificial Intelligence or “AI” may be a current buzzword, but as anyone in the tech industry knows, its been around in various forms for years. At NexJ, for years we’ve used various forms of AI to help industry-leading financial firms enhance the relationships their advisors have with customers.

But there is a transformation underway that makes it possible for AI in its many flavors to supercharge and transform client engagement in the financial industry. And it’s why NexJ today can offer some of our AI-powered capabilities as products that firms can essentially “wire” into their current platforms. We call these capabilities the Nudge-AI Suite.

But first, let’s back up a bit and define what we mean by AI.

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.

The wealth management industry has always been competitive. With the advent of robo-advisors, retail investor apps and financial firms of all stripes entering the fray, each promising potential clients more of what they want, how can an advisor stand above the crowd and attract the right kind of clients?