Celebrating Advisor360°’s anniversary last month gave me the opportunity to reflect on the evolution of our company—and look ahead to a few of the many exciting advances we have planned for the future!
When I consider Advisor360°’s growth and evolution over the last five years, I think about all we have been able to achieve as a company—like saving advisors over seven million hours in time spent running reports and serving three million households with one trillion in assets. But more than anything else—my mind goes to our staff and the culture of excellence that defines us. Our core values are deeply ingrained in everything we do: We lean in, we are innovators, we are client-obsessed, and “we are builders who have fun.”
I spoke with Doug Wood, Darren Tedesco, and Jeff Schwantz—all excellent stewards of these values—and asked them to reflect on what it has taken to build an enterprise-class software company, the data that underlies all that we do, and our innovations in AI.
Delighting Our Customers
As Senior Vice President of Client Success at Advisor360°, Doug Wood prides himself on delivering enterprise-class service and delivery. His goal over the last five years? Relentlessly delight our clients. “We strive to be client-obsessed and have built this into our core values—relentlessly seeking to delight our clients and exceed their expectations as part of our culture.”
But Doug knows it’s not enough to just delight our clients, we need to delight their advisors and investors too, saying, “our products and services are deployed to assure that our clients meet the needs of their advisors and investors, leveraging our technology and R&D.”
When it comes to our approach for delivering enterprise-class service, Doug says it requires extraordinary systematic care. “Extraordinary in our desire to provide the highest level of proactive and effective service and support. Systematic in our deployment of world-class technology and processes to ensure software uptime, performance, security, availability, and high service-level agreements (SLAs). And care in how we show empathy, awareness, and a focused interest when responding to clients’ urgent needs through our team members.”
According to Doug, this approach helps ensure we know how customers are doing qualitatively and we confirm that with their results and progress quantitively.
Throughout his time here, Doug has focused on building a culture of service, saying that “enterprise-class service starts with the quality of the people providing it. They need to be deeply aware and experienced with our products, offerings, and underlying infrastructure. At Advisor360°, our people have extensive financial services industry experience as well as industry-tested skills providing and supporting products to enterprise-class firms. This guarantees awareness of financial services and wealth management best practices while considering our clients’ unique workflows and needs.”
Doug summed it all up nicely, saying, “enterprise-class service requires that we work every day to ensure our clients’ success and to improve their results as a partner by efficiently and productively implementing our products and solutions.”
A Focus on Quality, Holistic Data
In addition to our enterprise-class orientation, at five years old, Advisor360° is also focused on driving productivity in wealth management though innovation—in part through automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
We know from our recent research that advisors are poised to embrace AI; but, according to Advisor360° President Darren Tedesco, there’s an important caveat.
“The world needs quality data—AI capabilities are useless without a foundation of quality, holistic data,” he explains. “AI-generated insights are only as reliable as the data they’re drawn from.”
And that’s where Advisor360° improves the process and creates meaningful value: “Our unified data layer and data solutions create clean, consistent, and comprehensive data sets that leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning to deliver business insights. The last thing a busy advisor wants to do is compare competing data from multiple sources to determine what’s correct.”
Our proprietary solution integrates hundreds of data feeds and internal platform data across a wide and deep suite of capabilities into a cohesive whole, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and readily available throughout the platform.
Darren went on to explain that “holistic data also requires a human touch and oversight.”
“Our experienced teams identify and address data issues in real time to ensure accuracy and reliability. With many years of experience building high-performing platforms, we’re moving into our sixth year leveraging AI as the natural next step to enable outcome-oriented capabilities that boost efficiency.”
What About the Next 5 Years?
“First, we are introducing our next-gen virtual digital assistant, ViDA®, with a focus on finance, workflows, and human behavior relative to the wealth management industry,” Darren explains.
And ViDA is “only the beginning” of many AI and data-driven solutions you’ll see from Advisor360° in the coming months. “Our innovative data solutions and AI-powered suite of WealthTech capabilities will continue to utilize automation so advisors can spend more time serving clients and building their business,” said Darren. “I’m incredibly excited that Advisor360° is on the leading edge of such important innovation.”
Advisors Are at the Center of Our Value Proposition
In addition to data, Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Schwantz said that “improving life for advisors and their staff” is another main ideal that sets our company—and our suite of flexible, integrated solutions—apart from any other WealthTech today.
“When I joined Advisor360° a little under a year back, it struck me immediately that the advisor experience is integrated into everything we do,” he says. “When we develop new capabilities, it’s with advisor satisfaction in mind; when we release a landmark enhancement, it’s to help advisors serve clients better.”
Jeff went on to explain that our integrated solutions for the back-office and client experience also filter through to advisors, saying, “when a firm is functioning with an updated, fully-integrated tech stack and firing on all cylinders, it makes everyone happier and more efficient—and that has a positive impact on advisor retention.”
And that “efficiency” is central to where Advisor360° stands at age five.
“When you look at the solutions we’ve introduced in our first five years, like our award-winning Digital Onboarding, what they ultimately do is unleash a firm’s productivity potential,” he explains. “It all comes down to that because streamlined workflows, like fast and efficient account opening and client reporting, free advisors up to do what they really love—serving clients and building business.”
More Innovation on the Way
Helping advisors increase productivity and provide personalized advice comes down to better data management and integration. Throughout our first five years, we’ve been honored every day to serve so many advisors, staff, and industry executives—helping them become more productive and build their business. And we have much more innovation on the way!
