In a recent Cerulli report, 87% of advisors surveyed reported that “scaling services offerings across client segments” was a major or moderate challenge for their business.* At the same time, the report goes on to say that advisors expect to increase their planning offerings and that by 2023, 82% of clients will receive targeted or comprehensive financial planning services.
There has also been a tremendous amount of press regarding the increasing client expectations for personalization. This extends not just to personalized investment solutions and tax management – which require technology to scale – but also personalized relationships and personalized services. As with financial plans, understanding a client’s unique goals and aspirations is critical, and if the advisor hopes to retain the client’s assets with the next generation, then there is a need to build a relationship with another whole set of individuals.
This all takes a lot of time. So, enabling efficiencies for advisors on every-day tasks creates considerable value for their practices.
Vestmark recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to quantify the benefits of the VestmarkONE® platform with four of our wealth management clients, all of whom have deployed VestmarkONE as the Rep as PM tool for their advisors. Among other benefits, Forrester found that there were significant advisor time savings – as much as 25% - from the deployment of the platform.
The study found, from interviews with these clients, that the VestmarkONE platform enabled advisors to reduce their workload in managing accounts in the key areas of managing taxes, rebalancing, and adjusting for drift.
One client COO noted, “Vestmark makes the work much easier for our advisors to do. The biggest lift is from an account portfolio management perspective in where we are seeing great time savings.”
Another client VP of Equity Advisory stated, “It is a much more efficient way to rebalance and run model portfolios. You want to run a model across many accounts and rebalance efficiently – compared to what we had prior it’s been a huge win. Advisors have said to us specifically that this tool has saved them a lot of time over our old architecture.”
The VestmarkONE platform enables the efficient management of portfolios in a personalized, tax efficient way – across hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of accounts. Eliminating manual, time-consuming and error-prone workflows, the VestmarkONE platform automates the management and rebalancing of personalized, tax managed accounts in a streamlined and scalable way.
We have also received separate feedback directly from advisors affiliated with one of the firms who participated in the commissioned TEI study. They said:
“This tool has given us so much more efficiency and scalability within our practice that we hope to continue to grow and spend more time with our clients and prospective clients.”
“…we freed up four to six days of work, not only for me, but for two other people, so basically 12 to 18 days of time that we don't have to spend any longer on doing non-productive activities around rebalancing.”
While every advisor and practice makes an individual decision about how to re-deploy the time saved, this time can, and most often IS, re-deployed to deepen client relationships, offer more comprehensive services, improve client retention, and ultimately grow the business.
The TEI study also noted that clients interviewed stated that recruiting and retention of advisors was crucial and “while technology was not at the forefront of the advisors’ minds on joining organizations, it was important knowing that there was the capability to drive their books of business forward efficiently and effectively.” So, while not the leading factor in recruiting, advisor efficiency is certainly an important part of the story.
Let us show you how we can help add time back to your advisors’ day…download the full Forrester Consulting study today.
*Source: Cerulli US Advisor Metrics 2021, Exhibit 2.14.
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