Darren Tedesco
Advisor360° President Darren Tedesco delves into how advisors ensure clean, accurate data and consistent user workflows with our household-based data model.
Video transcript
Chip Kispert: How do you balance a comprehensive, beginning-to-end solution with maintaining innovation?
Darren Tedesco: Well, there's a couple of answers I'd give to that. One, while we're an all-in-one, we're not an everything-in-one, it's really important that you build an ecosystem and partnerships around you. We're integrated now with well over 30 software solutions. So that's one point.
The second point is, if you don't have clean data as a solid foundation that's consistent across the various applications, you're potentially building software on a house of cards, you've got to get the data right.
And so the very first application we built for our platform was a household-based data model that was really important in the impetus for everything we've built on top of that. So whether it's performance reporting, document management, client portal, it really doesn't matter the kind of sleeve of software, all that has been built on that foundation. So that's fundamental to the strategy. You've got to have the data right. Otherwise, again, the software that sits on top of it isn't really going to matter worth a squat.
And then as you look at each of the functionalities that an advisor needs to run their business or the broker-dealer, frankly, needs to run their business as well. When you're thinking about those, you put it on top of that data and you want to have that consistent, unified experience from a UX standpoint. We've got a whole staff of people here that are focused on the UX experience, masters in human factors, certified usability analysts, we pride ourselves on having that front-end experience be so easy that you don't even need a training manual for it.
And if you've got that consistent across the various software, it makes it so much easier for the users to 1) take advantage of it, 2) they don't have to get trained as thoroughly because all of the system works consistently, and then 3) as you're pulling it all together, you're not having to jump between different applications and contextually shift, so it makes the users more productive at the end of the day. That's really the most important thing.