The 2023 Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor Conference, held last month in Tampa, Florida, featured a large gathering of financial advisors and representatives across the fintech industry attending the 2½-day conference. Hosted by Joel Bruckenstein and his team from T3 Consulting, the conference covered everything from how technology providers are continuing to expand their features and integration capabilities to how advisors can manage their own expanding tech stacks to the ever-present question of how AI tools like ChatGPT will impact the advisory industry.
In this guest post, Craig Iskowitz – CEO and founder of Ezra Group, a financial technology consulting firm – summarizes this year’s conference highlights with his signature Twitter-driven recap, kicking off with presentation highlights from financial planning software platform MoneyGuide, which announced its own version of the increasingly popular “one-page financial plan”, reflecting the greater demand from advisors to streamline printed plan materials. Additionally, MoneyGuide rolled out a new “Plan Pulse” dashboard allowing advisory firms to look across all of their clients’ plans and identify those who have fallen behind.
Another ongoing theme of the conference, which has persisted for several years, is the continuing effort to expand software integration capabilities to cover all parts of a client’s plan with no gaps caused by the failure of one tool to talk to another, and the different approaches that firms take to achieve better integration – whether they work to increase their integration with different third-party software tools (like MoneyGuide), offer a variety of products and services that can be purchased separately but integrate seamlessly with one another (like Morningstar), or combine virtually every type of technology tool into a single “growth platform” (like Riskalyze) that seeks to serve as virtually the advisor’s entire tech stack in one product!
Other major highlights from the T3 Advisor Technology Conference included:
- Several speakers talked about how their firms are using AI technology, including Orion Advisor Technology President Brian McLaughlin, who discussed how advisors add value in ways that can’t be co-opted by AI and whose firm recently integrated ChatGPT into its RedTail CRM software.
- The resources that advisory firms invest in new technology can be wasted if employees don’t know how (or why) to use it. As Sequoia Financial’s Chief Technology Officer Trevor Chuna discussed, a software adoption plan goes beyond just initial training and includes updates on new features, ongoing training, and regular communication to get ongoing results.
- An update from Fidelity provided data suggesting that clients increasingly want support in areas beyond investment management from their financial advisors – which in turn has led advisors to invest heavily in specialized planning software to go deeper into more areas as robo-advisor technology has drastically reduced the cost of providing investment management.
- An update from Schwab, amidst the final stages of its integration with TD Ameritrade (scheduled for completion before next year’s T3 conference), confirmed that TDA’s Veo advisor platform (which allows for integration with many third-party platforms), as well as its thinkpipes and iRebal trading and rebalancing tools, are expected to be retained and migrated over to Schwab.
- RIA owners who sell their firms to large RIA aggregators based on overall price alone – without fully understanding the terms of the deal – can find themselves regretting their decision, according to Dynasty Financial Partners founder Shirl Penney.
Finally, the annual T3/Inside Information Software Survey, which assesses the software programs used by financial advisors, found that almost every software category has seen greater adoption among advisors – as while advisors are increasingly offering comprehensive advice and expanding how they provide value to their clients, their tech stacks are also expanding in kind – which only reinforces the challenges of navigating and maximizing the value of numerous software tools via enhanced integration capabilities in the software platforms themselves.
Ultimately, the 2023 T3 Advisor Conference brought together vendors, industry thought leaders, financial advisors, and students to gain insight into the fast-paced growth and change of the financial planning industry and the new technology tools available to help financial planning businesses flourish. And with the expansive array of new and upcoming technology solutions, there was an increased focus – which will no doubt continue as a theme in future conferences –not just on the tools themselves but also on how to use an entire suite of technology solutions while still creating a seamless planning experience for clients!
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