AdviceTech is one of the most exciting and quickest developing areas of technology. It has the power to improve the services financial advisers offer clients while making their professional lives significantly easier.
If you’re new (or newish) to this subject, take a moment to read our view of why AdviceTech emerged and what will happen next.
In the beginning: the age before AdviceTech
A decade after the release of the original iPhone, it is now clear that it was a new dawn. Computing capabilities were no longer chained to a desk and a new world of technological solutions bloomed.
The simplistic usability of mobile apps disrupted old markets, ushering in new ones. Fintech was the financial market’s attempt to ride this wave of possibilities.
Financial advice, however, never even got on the surfboard, let alone rode the wave, and there remains a huge opportunity to apply modern tools and approaches to the service, not only bringing it up to speed but launching it into the future.
This opportunity is called AdviceTech.
The rise of AdviceTech
In the past, tech could be divided into what we could call overbearing behemoths and micro-specialised islands. Software in the former category would aspire to be the standard for an entire industry and offer a large single product that attempted solutions for a multiplicity of problems.
Such software was often complex, byzantine, and crumbled with additional features no one used or understood. Eventually, tech developments swang in the opposite direction, giving us the latter category of super specialised tools that offered solutions to single problems.
These apps were easier to use and to understand but there was a downside: users were burdened with multiple non-integrated tools that didn’t speak to one another, creating redundancies and inefficiencies.
AdviceTech today
Today’s crop of technological tools offers financial advisers modern solutions that learn from these limitations of the past.
These days, apps go through a rigorous process of product design that clearly identifies a problem and validates the proposed solution with real users.
From the beginning, they are engineered as true SaaS solutions that easily scale up as their users/firms require. Products are no longer built and sealed in a bubble; they are designed to connect and communicate with one another, allowing for more seamless user experiences, saving time and money.
And the new thinking is not limited to what’s under the hood: apps are now designed to be quick to adopt, as well as easy to use and to pay for. New tech strives for simplicity with a focus on user-friendly UX and streamlined UI with copy that avoids reliance on industry jargon.
Apps are now explicitly designed to be user intuitive. Gone are the days of special training sessions or “set up” fees attached to adopting new software.
In fact, there is an increasing focus on price transparency with the elimination of extraneous fees and the introduction of trials where customers can sample the product for free before moving into a single monthly or annual fee to license the software.
The future of AdviceTech
AdviceTech has taken many of these new approaches on board and will continue to monitor other markets for innovations that further lower the barrier to adoption.
Taking the lead from other industries, we are pursuing increasingly autonomous tools that can gather and process data for financial advisers, cutting out data entry and laborious research.
Tools should automatically connect with each other to bring advisers the power of specific focused data from a multiplicity of sources streamlined into a single report.
All of which aims to give more control to advisers, allowing them to choose which tools best fit their clients and their own style of advice. And ultimately freeing up advisers to give them more time to focus on their clients’ individual human needs.
It is good to remember that humans are the point of all this technological advancement. We have seen the rise (and fall) of the so-called “robo-adviser” tools. But advising a client is of course more than just data and analytics, ones and zeros and maths.
It’s building a relationship and understanding an individual’s aspirations, fears, hopes, and dreams. It’s a pursuit of “financial wellbeing”: a balance of financial security and freedom, in the present and the future. It’s a balance that’s emotional, subjective, not always logical, as unique as the individual clients themselves.
AdviceTech exists to offer tools to advisers that allow them to be more organised with their data, more penetrating in their analysis, and more efficient with their time. All of this is so that they can build relationships with their clients and help them in their pursuit of financial wellbeing.
That’s why I’m passionate about pursuing the newest technologies and finding the best ways to apply them to our industry. AdviceTech aspires to the ultimate goal of any technology: to improve the quality of our lives and make us happier, healthier humans.
Wish to find what this Advice Tech company can do for your business? Book a Demo with us, free of charge.
Subscribe here to our updates and the “Why I…” series!