Last week, UBS unveiled its Advice Advantage Platform, a service platform which allows customers to transact their business virtually with a human-assisted robo-advisor. UBS’ platform is targeted at affluent investors with $10,000 or more. For a charge of 75 base points, UBS’s Advice Advantage gives customers real-time access to account analytics, goal tracking, and portfolio diagnostics, among others. The release of Advice Advantage at UBS was most recently preceded by the launch of similar human assisted robo-advisor technologies at Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Merrill Lynch.
These latest technology innovations have been highly anticipated and are gaining industry-wide support, particularly from the advisors themselves. Large advisor teams seek out wirehouses offering assisted client services technology as preferable partners given current industry trends. Robo-advisor or AI-advisor, as the media has dubbed them, benefit the advisor by allowing them to service high-wealth clients at a supreme level of efficiency while maintaining control of the client relationship.
With day-to-day tracking, reporting, and statistical analysis handled by the robo-advisor platform, the advisor’s time is freed up to focus on the most important tasks of achieving results for their clients, such as monitoring investments, assessing risk, and maintaining a successful product portfolio. This high-level of client service, information access, and account transparency drives the client-advisor relationship forward and offers the potential for growth through expansion of the business relationship in terms of portfolio size and service offerings.
Additionally, the time-efficiency benefits of robo-advisor technologies continues by affording advisors the schedule flexibility necessary to procure new clients and cultivate the necessary rapport with them. This benefit proves to be invaluable – and the one most favored by advisors – in that client acquisition and growth is the main contributor to an advisor achieving increased earnings in the present and shoring up additional earnings potential for the future.
Though the buzz words of “AI” and “Robo” make these technology platforms sound futuristic, nothing could be further from the truth. Advisor-assisted, client management and services platforms are simply an evolution of technology, readily available today, that when applied successfully makes the best operational sense at every level of a large firm’s organization – from the client who wants both customer service and results, to the advisor eager to manage and grow their book of business, to the C-suite executive who expects to see profit margins rise.
It’s surprisingly refreshing to watch a technology trend like this developing at the wirehouses and it will be interesting to see if large firms continue this forward-thinking path to the benefit of the client, the advisor, and themselves.
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