A Q&A with our Head of Enterprise Data and Analytics
Advisor360° was recently honored among ThinkAdvisor’s inaugural LUMINARIES Class of 2021—a new award recognizing top-performing wealth management industry participants—for our FinTech and innovation with Unified Data Fabric™ (UDF). I spoke with Michele Doyle, Vice President, Enterprise Data & Analytics at Advisor360°, about what this award means for the firm, what UDF can do for broker-dealers, and the latest trends in data processing.
What does being a member of the ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES class of 2021 award mean for Advisor360°?
Our entire company is delighted to be among such a distinguished group who are pushing the industry forward. The team has been dedicated to developing an innovative way to create efficiencies in back-end data processing to aid digital transformation initiatives. We’re honored to be recognized.
What’s unique about the Advisor360° all-in-one wealth and asset management software approach to data as opposed to a data warehouse?
A typical warehouse is a read-only copy of data brought together from different sources, primarily used for reporting and analytics. Our UDF ingests data from different sources and knits it together to form a cohesive, dynamic data layer that can be augmented and interacted with as part of our overall platform.
For example, if you want to change a household name in your CRM, with our dynamic UDF you make this change only once and it will be reflected across the entirety of the wealth management platform across every screen and report. It doesn’t work like this in platforms using typical data warehouses that are static and read-only.
How does this enterprise data management help financial advisors and insurance agents be more successful?
Enterprise wealth and asset management software often doesn’t integrate or synchronize data effectively.
In our platform, we have a unified system of record for all components—whether these are investor-facing, advisor-facing, or are used to support broker-dealer back office processing. This means that advisors can access data as a cohesive whole using our two-way data integrations instead of signing into multiple applications to do their job.
For instance, advisors can easily prepare for client meetings with built-in workflows and schedule a bundle of their favorite reports to run with a simple click. We’ve dramatically reduced the issues of having disconnected data, which makes practices and advisors more efficient.
Advisors’ systems, advisors’ staff systems, advisors’ clients’ systems, and the broker-dealers’ back office systems all share a common and connected view of the entire business across all applications, improving efficiency.
How do financial advisors get a holistic view of clients’ financial lives?
One of the innovations our team is so proud of is our capability for automated householding so that accounts, policies, proposals, plans, and CRM contacts are grouped in a way that makes sense for a practice and its advisors.
Because our UDF is dynamic, we can save wealth and asset management advisors time and give them a complete picture of their clients' lives. New accounts from the same household are aggregated automatically, without the need for manual data entry or intervention.
A household-level dashboard displays existing and pending insurance policies, proprietary and non-proprietary, in a single view across all members of a household. It includes all types of life insurance, long-term care insurance, and fixed/indexed/variable annuities.
Importantly, advisors can view not only all protection products in a household-level dashboard, but also all aspects of a household’s complete financial life, from proposals to financial plans to investments to insurance products. Learn how our UDF and householding offer advisors a proven productivity advantage.
The bottom line
Our secure UDF powers our wealth management platform so advisors can look at their clients by income, assets, insurance, state, category, model, and more in a single view. Whether advisors are engaged in householding, rebalancing, marketing campaigns, analytics, or client onboarding, our UDF simplifies the work life of an advisor and bridges the gaps in disconnected data.
Jennifer Sawan focuses on leading platform engagement inside of and outside of Advisor360°; helping employees better understand our platform and leveraging tools and data to enable those outside of Advisor360° to do the same.
Jennifer Sawan
