Aaron Drew
This article comes from Austin, the State Capital of Texas, where I have been for the past few days to learn about how the so-called "fintech" revolution is impacting financial advisory businesses and the broader funds management industry.
Downtown Austin is a curious place, think bohemian San Francisco juxtaposed with traditional Texan cowboy bars.
Financial advisory firms in the US have a bewildering choice of options to improve the way they handle financial planning, client reporting, investment research, and portfolio management.
The ultimate goal of these technologies is to provide people with a more comprehensive real-time view of their financial position (across their bank accounts, pension plans, and other savings), and progress towards meeting their financial goals, at a cheaper price.
It is a given that this information should be available from any type of Internet-enabled device. And that the user can configure the detail they want to see.
But meeting the goal requires that firms pick the right tech partners - no easy feat in the constantly evolving US marketplace.
Two broad guidelines in this regard are to choose partners with a commitment to ongoing tech development, and to ensuring their software "plugs and plays" with as broad a range of data sources and other systems as possible.
This helps ensure efficiency gains with mass appeal, and reduces the risk of being saddled with a solution that gets left behind.
A particular fintech development of focus is Robo financial advice - tech algorithms that help people establish a portfolio that broadly suits their risk tolerances and financial position, at a considerably cheaper price than has traditionally been available.
This is sometimes seen as a threat to traditional one-on-one financial advice, but it need not be so.
The more tech-savvy firms we have visited are employing the algorithms on their own systems to enable them to reach Millennial customers, a demographic they struggled to provide a cost-effective solution before to.
A lecture I attended by Nobel prize winner Robert Merton on the topic of fintech boiled the implications for businesses down two simple propositions.
First, that pure transactional services (whether it be in banking, insurance, or funds management) will have margins eroded to razor-thin levels as more and more of these services are outsourced to tech players.
And second, that any business service requiring the establishment of trust because the service cannot be commoditised to a simple algorithm will, if anything, thrive in the new environment. For example, inter-generational estate and business succession planning.
The opportunity this presents to financial service business is to employ tech to reduce costs and increase the most scarce of resources, time.
For financial advisory businesses this means more time to develop empathy and understanding of their clients needs and goals, and more time to develop better services to meet these needs.
Aaron Drew is an Associate of the NZIER and Chief Investment Officer of the Stewart Financial Group, whose head office is in Hastings. His show Real Wealth can be heard on Radio Kidnappers on Tuesday afternoons and on podcast.