The two technological advantages that drive productivity
For any technology company, it’s always about the product.
Here at Advisor360°, we’re evolving from development and raw execution to understanding our long-term strategy and go-to-market plans. And having been a part of some great enterprise-focused tech companies across the years, I've realized the key tenet to providing the best experience possible all comes down to the product.
The “product” means this: solving customer problems and enabling opportunities. It’s that basic—and that essential.
Investment advisor productivity is a big deal
According to The Kitces Report’s financial planning study, the average financial plan takes 15 hours to create and 3 client meetings to discuss. And that’s just one plan. The study calls out the fact that the majority of advisors rely on Word and Excel to supplement the writing of their financial plans. We know there’s a better, faster, stronger path to productivity.
As we look toward the future at Advisor360°, our platform is well-positioned to enable the growth of those in the wealth management business. It permits advisors and broker-dealers (whether they're independent, banking, insurance broker-dealers, or roll-up RIAs) to either service more clients at scale or to sell more of their financial products and drive efficiency in the back-end processes of their firms.
True integration
There have been many claims in the WealthTech industry about how companies deliver an integrated wealth management solution. But they haven’t delivered.
These competitors’ solutions are not integrated; their “holistic” experience is just a common look and feel—if that!—with single sign-on without any real functionality depth. They’re often using marketing slogans and superficial veneers to hide the fact that what they really provide is an aggregation of different products by different companies—without any underlying shared or common framework.
How is that holistic?
At Advisor360°, we’ve worked over many years to build the only truly integrated/unified wealth management platform. What does this mean?
It means connections across all layers of the platform: from the user’s positive experience fulfilling their wants and needs to the underlying data and process that support it. A deeply-integrated platform is critical to keeping users loyal to the product and results in the most successful business outcomes for all parties. Our holistic platform was started inside of Commonwealth Financial Network and refined over the last two decades with many features, functions, and integrations that are extremely unique in the marketplace.
Adding value
It’s clear to me that our value proposition is derived from our exclusive technological advantage. This advantage is inconspicuous and somewhat hidden; however, it underscores the fundamental value proposition and is what makes Advisor360° unlike any other WealthTech company.
I have seen in many early stage companies (and even big tech behemoths like Sun Microsystems and others), that understanding your advantage is key to delivering value to your users. When the technological advantages are delivered as enterprise-class, the market opportunity is limitless.
We like to call these advantages our “superpowers.”
Superpower #1: Unified Data Fabric™
This Unified Data Fabric surrounds and embraces all sleeves of our software. This is the fundamental building block of Advisor360°. This unified fabric gives a complete view of everything within a household and every household within a business (or subsets thereof).
So, what value does our unified household data fabric bring to the table?
By assembling performance reporting, customer onboarding, CRM, portfolio rebalancing and trading document management, planning tools, a client portal, and operations (to name a few)—it means that the advisors’ system, advisors’ staff system, advisors’ clients' system, and the broker-dealers’ back office system ALL share a common and connected view of the entire book of business; disconnected data no longer exists.
It’s a disruptor in the marketplace: the true definition of a unified experience.
Superpower #2: the team
Another key difference between Advisor360° and our competitors in the marketplace: our team. These colleagues are the pieces that make our product possible—they’re the foundation of both the product and the company. “People” are often cited as differentiators, but what we have is rare in the WealthTech space.
Our team is made up of an outstanding combination of financial services people from the broker-dealer world, along with experienced software veterans that acutely understand industry challenges and workflows. As you may have seen in our recent senior management team announcement, we’re building out our enterprise leadership team.
Now that we have coupled this financial services expertise with enterprise software expertise, the result is a deep understanding of what it means to deliver enterprise-class wealth management software at scale. Moving forward, these enterprise companies represent our core client base.
The bottom line: we’re not your typical WealthTech company.
We have a deep understanding and perspective of our customers’ pain points.
We have exclusive technology assets manifested and built on top of our Unified Data Fabric.
We have an expert team forged from two worlds coming together, enabling the digital transformation of wealth management.
As Advisor360° expands our product development and begins implementing our go-to-market strategy, we look forward to sharing our progress in improving productivity for everyone in the WealthTech space.
Richard Napolitano is Advisor360°’s Chief Executive Officer, ensuring every team in the company is focused on a simple strategic vision: creating outstanding WealthTech products for our clients’ success.
Richard Napolitano
