“Life moves pretty fast,” observed Ferris Bueller back in 1986. It’s truer thirty years on than ever. Re-watching the UK TV series Life on Mars recently, it again struck me how alien a world without tech seems, yet how recent our dependence has developed.
Stewart Bell is Founder & Business Coach at Audere Coaching & Consulting. The opinions and statements are deemed to be those of the author, and do not represent the view of Robeco.
More are seeking choice in what they use, how they use and how it enables their chosen business model.
As such, tech is emerging as the new battleground for achieving much needed business efficiency gains.
The last decade has seen fundamental change in the way software is used and provided. We’ve seen the dominance of all-in-one solutions replaced by best-of-breed apps, software subscriptions, extensions and plugins, with data flying freely back and forth between.
The adviser tech world hasn’t been so quick to adapt to this trend. Many of the tools used by advisers continue to be mostly of the all-in-one nature.
Often comprehensive in their approach and certainly aiming to do all that’s required, they’ve sometimes fallen down on form and usability factors.
This is fostering the rise of more small players in the market.
Often they’re advisers, sometimes with tech experience themselves, who decided the only way to get the solution they wanted was to build it.
Some are larger businesses who, having scratched their own itch, have decided to take it to the world.
Others are fresh new entrants, ready to disrupt their way into the market, by offering to do things more established players cannot.
It’s an exciting new frontier, but we’re in a transition phase.
Whilst more advisers are seeking a solution where their CRM speaks to their online marketing tool, which triggers their workflow management, which enjoys a perfectly symbiotic relationship with the plan production engine, and they can plug and play additional elements in and out at will, we’re not there yet.
The general agreement is a complete solution is likely one to three years away.
In the meantime, two strategies are clear if you’re pulling your hair out now.
The choice is to not commit to a single incomplete solution, but rather pick and choose best of breed, maintain the ability to get out quickly and manage data disparity by only putting into systems what is absolutely needed.
It’s not perfect, but then neither is the alternative.
It’s a moving feast and increasingly one big lever for helping advisers increase capacity to manage existing clients and help new ones. It’s an exciting time to watch it unfold, from a tech perspective at least.
Two questions beg to be answered.
In the meantime, for firms eager to start tinkering, playing and potentially even finding a compromise solution before the final panacea, here are six plug-and-play tools that already fuel our world.
Finally, for you tech-tinkerers, Zapier is great for building bridges between tools you need to be on talking terms. It provides a low-tech means of linking together applications for specific tasks, by setting up what is known as Zaps. It’s a lite version of what an interconnected tech world will eventually look like.
Stewart Bell is Founder & Business Coach at Audere Coaching & Consulting. The opinions and statements are deemed to be those of the author, and do not represent the view of Robeco.
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