Darren Tedesco
Advisor360° President Darren Tedesco discusses how our modern client portal enables advisors and their clients to communicate when and how they choose throughout the wealth planning experience.
Video transcript
Chip Kispert: Where do you see that investor-customer prospect relationship going when it comes to technology and access to information and what's next?
Darren Tedesco: So I've talked to the Advisor360° team about this for a while, when you really think about technology, it's an extension of the advisor specifically here. It's not a replacement of the advisor. When you look at the robo companies that were all in existence and all the rage 10 years ago, right? And you look back, well, there's not many of them that are still around and it's because they realized that yes, you're always going to have your people who just want to do it themselves and those retail investors, if you will. The reality of it is most people want some type of advisor assistance.
Now, think of technology as a spectrum where on one side of the spectrum, the client does everything on their own and on the other side of the spectrum, the advisor does everything for the client. The reality of the world and where the robos actually did add value, which is, you can now turn that dial up and down for any given relationship.
So some clients—Millennials, let's just call it a generation, if you will— want more technology as part of that advisor relationship but they still want access to the advisor and all the advisor's experience, knowledge, wisdom, et cetera. Whereas you might have people who are further along in their life journey and they want more advisor but that doesn't mean they don't want to still hop on a mobile app and move money, or place a trade, or see what their performance is online, that's the reality of the spectrum of tools.
For us, the most important thing is equipping broker-dealers and their advisors with a world class client portal that enables that. And when I say portal, it includes mobile apps, of course, you've got to have mobile apps these days. But it enables the extension of the advisor as opposed to a replacement of the advisor. Does that make sense?
Chip: It makes absolute sense. Now as you look at the must-haves going forward, how do those firms that aren't keeping track stay relevant?
Darren: If you're not in the game from a tech standpoint in the clients' minds, you're probably going to end up losing the clients when you think about, and we have a lot of data here. Over 3% of the households in America are on our platform. We see the beneficiary data, for example.
So I can tell you that the money is going to be passing down to the Gen Xs and the Millennials, right? Those generations have an expectation that the technology is going to be world class and that's going to be part of the advisor service. If you don't provide that, they will find somewhere else that they have that kind of capability.
So it's becoming table stakes really quickly if you want to compete for the future dollars in the $20 trillion dollar, whatever the magic number you hear about this week, that is going to be inherited and passed along.