How do today’s advisors best demonstrate their value to clients and enhance advisor-client collaboration through digitization? Answers to these questions and more are available in a new report produced by Aite Group, “RIA Digital Transformation: A Competitive Necessity in a Post-Pandemic Marketplace.”
This new report, sponsored by Envestnet | Tamarac®, examines RIAs’ perspectives on client-facing digital solutions, some of the biggest challenges in digitizing their businesses and best practices toward digital transformation. It provides RIAs with an understanding of their peer RIAs’ sentiments, attitudes, and current efforts regarding digitalization. It also shows how they measure up in the competitive landscape and illustrates the essential digital capabilities needed to support clients, including best practices and actions RIAs can take during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
The report is based on Aite Group’s online survey of 400 U.S. financial advisors that included 98 independent RIAs and 48 hybrid RIAs that maintain a broker-dealer affiliation. The research was conducted from April through June 2019.
Highlights of the study include:
- Advisors view demonstrating their value to clients as a top priority and believe digitalization will enhance client engagement, services, and the overall experience.
- The benefits of digitalization are leveraged to enhance the RIA/client relationship, not replace it. In addition, digitalization provides an opportunity for advisors to improve practice efficiency and capacity to expand client services and their client bases.
- Acquiring new clients ranks as a top benefit for independent and hybrid RIAs, which see digital tools as essential for engaging younger prospects and the next generation of clients.
- Client adoption of digital tools among independent and hybrid RIAs surveyed was low. The low use of digital tools is attributed to several factors, including costs and lack of integration with other tools in the advisor’s tech stack.
- Best practices in RIA digitalization include developing a formal strategy, dedicating technology resources, segmenting clients, and conducting vendor reviews.
- Account aggregation and understanding a client’s entire financial household are essential as RIAs continue to expand beyond investment management to holistic financial planning and non-traditional support services, such as healthcare, elder services, banking services, and mortgages.
Read the full report
For a copy of this new report, click here to download “RIA Digital Transformation: A Competitive Necessity in a Post-Pandemic Marketplace.”
To learn more about how you can partner with Tamarac to begin your digital transformation, visit www.tamaracinc.com or give us a call at 866-525-8811.