What vibrant fintech technology can advisors expect this year?

The smell of freshly cut grass wafts through the Florida breeze and thousands of people escape winter storms around the country to head to the Sunshine State, which can only mean one thing.

The wealth management fintech conference season is of course back! Oh, geez, did that sound like the beginning of a clichéd article about baseball spring training?

This is Investment news, you’re here to read about the wealth management industry, and over the next month, thousands of financial advisors will travel to Florida to learn about the latest technology and how it can improve their practice. This week was the Ascent conference from Orion Advisor Solutions, which has quickly grown into one of the industry’s most significant providers of technology and turnkey asset management solutions. On March 13, Technology Tools for Today, the longest running fintech event for advisors, kicks off in Tampa Bay.

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All-in-one platforms, personalization and retirement income technology were the topics du jour in 2022. What can advisors expect this year?

I asked some people who attend many conferences what they think, or hope, will be the most talked about topics of the year. I also asked them which subjects should get less stage time, or which will just take a less prominent role compared to previous years. Here are some topics that rose to the top.

ALL ABOUT AI

This should probably come as no surprise to anyone who follows the news. Interest in artificial intelligence has exploded thanks to breakthroughs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Commercial applications are coming soon. Microsoft already has OpenAI powering its new Bing search engine, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it is working with Morgan Stanley to adapt the technology for advisers.

That buzz, combined with the industry’s push to provide personalization at scale, should mean conference attendees are hearing a lot about predictive technology, said Shawna Ohm, founder of Content 151, a content marketing firm for financial advisors.

“It’s been around for a while, and it’s the easiest way for vendors to look like they’re on top of the latest and greatest,” Ohm said.

Some, like Three Crowns Copywriting and Marketing founder and CEO Johnny Sandquist, hope AI, especially natural language processing, will be a focus of upcoming events. And some advisers, like WH Cornerstone Investments co-founder Bill Harris, would like to see AI that can catapult growth without adding many new employees.

Those expectations played out already this week at the Ascent conference, where Orion CEO Eric Clarke announced a new integration between ChatGPT and Redtail Speak, the compatible client text platform offered through Redtail CRM, which allows the artificial intelligence to analyze conversations and suggest responses.

Companies will undoubtedly look to ride the wave of public interest in AI to generate interest in their products, but beware of vaporware. It’s technically speaking of software that has been announced and announced, but is either still a concept or not yet fully built.

“Get ready for a ridiculous amount of ‘we have AI features [or] ChatGPT integrations that serve no real purpose beyond sounding cheesy,” XY Planning Network co-founder Michael Kitces, who attends more conferences than perhaps anyone in the industry, said in a statement.

His business partner, Alan Moore, agreed, writes on Twitter that he would like to see: “Fewer companies that say they use AI when AI doesn’t actually exist.”

DIGITAL ON BOARD

Perhaps the most surprising answer I got was Kitces saying he expects digital onboarding to get somewhat less stage time at fintech conferences this year. Despite being a staple of the pitches fintech companies make to advisors for years, digital onboarding is now the most shrinking part of Kitces’ notorious AdvisorTech map.

“Advisors didn’t want to pay for onboarding tools, they expect their custody/BD platforms to include them,” Kitces said in a direct message. “Now that most people have upgraded, the whole category is disappearing.”

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

“User experience” is one of those things that everyone agrees should be better, even if they have a hard time pinpointing exactly what “better” means. Demonstrating concrete improvements may be a major theme at fintech conferences in 2023.

While improvements have been made to customer-facing portals, the technology advisors use in the office are often still behind the times. The highly touted “open API” platforms and overlay dashboards that were so popular a few years ago still haven’t brought advisors to the promised land of a truly integrated technology stack.

“The industry has sold the concept of ‘integrated technology’ and not delivered it. At all. At best, single sign-on has been the solution for advisors,” said Amit Dogra, president and CEO of tru Independence, a firm that provides technology and services to breakout advisors “Advisors want single source, intuitive technology that is seamless and not patchwork technology.”

Sandquist echoed this, saying that he hopes to not see single sign-on features touted as integrations, and that there will be evidence that user interfaces are improving over the status quo.

Ohm just hopes to never hear the phrase “seamless integration” again.

“Not because it’s a bad thing — I love a seamless integration,” she said. “It’s just that the term is so overused that it has ceased to have any meaning. I would like to see the suppliers say what they really mean by that. Especially since we seem to be in a time of streamlining.”

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