Automation ideas for FA-Client meeting lifecycle

Prologue

The wealth management industry is a client relationship-centric business and communication plays a key role in strengthening client relationships. The client communication has further gained importance in backdrop of increased regulatory focus on the quality of advice being provided and the drive towards delivering good client outcomes or which are in the best financial interests of client.  

Despite all the advances in client communications, technology and the proliferation of email, texting, and digital messaging apps, client meetings are still at the centre of advisor and client engagement. Usually, a client meeting is an exchange of verbal and non-verbal (presentation or report) information between the advisor and client, and it often results in investment decisions and actions that can have a significant implication on the client’s financial situation.

Advisors can improve client trust, drive value with a personalized client experience, and identify business growth opportunities by arranging a well-organized client meeting. This article will deliberate on capabilities that wealth firms must build for advisor to conduct client meetings in an effective and efficient manner to deepen client relationships.

Current landscape

According to the Cerulli U.S. Advisor 2023 Metrics report, advisors spend 58% of their time working with clients and more than half of their time (32%) is spent on conducting and preparing for client meetings. There is an opportunity here to streamline the client meeting preparation component so that more time can be allocated to conducting the meeting and building long-term trusted relationships. The meeting preparation includes multiple tasks such as scheduling, agenda setting, and collating meeting content.

The advisors spend lot of time and effort in manually collating the information from multiple systems across the organisation and preparing a personalised client meeting presentation to provide a holistic view of their financial situation. It typically consists of relationship summary, financial goals, net-worth including held away assets, portfolio performance, retirement plan, marketing collaterals and more.

Given the manual or semi-automated methods, the financial advisors are unable to deliver a consistent client experience and personalize meeting presentation at scale.

High-level view of Advisor journey

The financial advisor sees client meetings as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to the client's success and ensure a shared understanding of goals. Advisors focus on client meetings to ensure that the client's financial plan remains aligned with their evolving needs, goals, and life circumstances. The high-level process for advisor client meeting includes,

• Pre-meeting preparation

The advisor communicates the high-level meeting objectives and finds a mutually suitable time to schedule an appointment as per the client preferences i.e., in-person or virtual.

The advisor then starts preparing the meeting material by collecting relevant client information such as current financial plan, retirement saving, portfolio holding, trading activity, performance report, tax statement, held away assets, estate plan and key updates on the follow-up items from the last meeting. Based on this collated information the advisor creates a visually rich presentation for the client meeting.

• Conduct client meeting

Advisors initiate open conversation with clients to understand the change in financial situation, life events, investment priorities and preferences, service-related feedback, and other concerns.

The advisors discuss investment opportunities as per new goals discovered during the meeting and take quick feedback to realign the existing investment strategy, portfolio allocations and set the right expectations to achieve the targets.

The advisor captures the meeting notes, draft action items and other follow-up tasks as part of the client meeting.

• Post meeting actions

Advisor shares minutes of the meeting, action plan agreed with the client and summarizes the status of client service requests. Advisor works on the revised investment policy statement, investment strategy, realigns the portfolio holdings to achieve the long-term goals and communicates the risk associated with the new strategies.

The wealth firms must aim to bring in advisor effectiveness and efficiency by minimizing the manual effort and time spent on preparing for client meetings. In this context, firms must consider building the following capabilities and solution components:

• Build a set of tools integrated with wealth platform for managing client meetings and ability to engage digitally. It will allow the advisor or client to schedule the meeting based on client preferences i.e., face to face or virtual and send meeting reminders and alerts. The secured virtual meeting room must provide best-in class client experience in a seamless manner.
• Equip the advisors with the ability to create reusable client meeting templates based on client relationships. This will allow advisors to customize the meeting content based on the agreed agenda and client preferences.
• Build an automation capability to aggregate and organize the client information from multiple systems across the organization as per the pre-defined client presentation template. The key integration points here will be CRM, financial planning, portfolio management system, external account aggregation and trading activity.
• The advisor must have the ability to schedule and generate presentations for client meetings on demand. The client presentations must convey the financial information in a clear and concise manner and use visually rich graphics for easier understanding.
• An AI enabled capability to generate highly personalized actionable insights based on the client information gathered by the automation engine. Deliver these insights to financial advisors as additional information to leverage during the client meeting. For example, tax loss harvesting opportunities or upcoming required minimum distribution (RMD). These actionable insights will help advisors to deliver the differentiated client experience in a hyper personalized manner.
• Develop an AI powered utility to capture the notes from the client meeting and create summary of action items and distribute it to client and advisor for acceptance before the end of the meeting. It can also draft follow-up email or trigger required workflows on behalf of the advisor.
• Build feedback mechanism to record the meeting insights generated by AI tools and successfully actioned by the advisor and client. This will help to improve the AI tool outcome in future.

The latest AI initiatives taken by the leading wealth management firms up in this space discussed here for reference.

• Merrill Lynch Wealth Management has rolled out a new digital appointment tool designed to help advisors save time and effort when scheduling meetings with both clients and prospects. It allows advisors to add multiple attendees to a meeting, proactively send automatic meeting reminders via text or email, and personalize meetings with clients’ preferences for platform and location — i.e., in person or virtual.
• Raymond James is working to assist advisors in hosting remote client reviews in various web-based locations, such as augmented reality and virtual reality.
• Morgan Stanley Debrief is an OpenAI-powered tool that generates notes on a financial advisors’ behalf in client meetings (with client consent). It also highlights the potential action items for advisors.
• SigFig has enhanced its capabilities with AI-driven smart tips, meeting prompts, and customizable recommendations based on real-time conversation analysis to discover new growth opportunities. The key features include automated transcripts, meeting summaries and post-meeting notes for advisors.
• CogniCor launched a digital assistant that helps advisors with client meetings, managing scheduling, creating the agenda, recording it, taking notes, and creating action items that resulted from the meeting.
• Iress announced new integration with AI-driven PlannerPal, offered to advisors along with Xplan. PlannerPal leverage AI capabilities to generate meeting transcripts, actionable summaries, and written follow-ups. This integration will help to achieve greater efficiency, reduce costs and take charge of Consumer Duty obligations.

Conclusion

The wealth management firms must focus on improving the client meeting preparation by leveraging a combination of AI and digital technologies. As an outcome, firms will deliver highly personalised services to clients and witness stronger client and advisor relationships to drive business growth. Firms will increase the advisor productivity, bring in cost efficiency and process effectiveness. Also, firms will gear to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.

References

1. https://www.cerulli.com/reports/us-advisor-metrics-2023
2. https://www.blackrock.com/us/financial-professionals/insights/client-review-meetings-obligation-or-opportunity
3. https://www.morganstanley.com/press-releases/ai-at-morgan-stanley-debrief-launch
4. https://www.sigfig.com/home/press/sigfig-expands-engage-platform-with-new-ai-capabilities/
5. https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2023/04/11/how_raymond_james_is_putting_ai-into_practice/
6. https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2024/07/31/merrill-unveils-new-scheduling-tool-for-clients-prospects/
7. https://www.fa-mag.com/news/cognicor--microsoft-team-to-launch-ai-virtual-assistants-76236.html?section=151
8. https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/101581/iress-integrates-with-ai-driven-plannerpal