As a financial advisor, you usually have your hands full with many things. For instance, you are always in search for lucrative investment opportunities for your clients. You formulate the best retirement plans, so your client can enjoy a fulfilling retired life. You also help some of your clients with making better insurance decisions.
You can’t expect to put your utmost energy on meeting the varying needs of your clients without having optimal FinTech solutions in your arsenal. Truth be told, if you aren’t comfortable with financial technology (FinTech), you can’t expect your business to grow and last in today’s digitalized economy.
As industry’s leading FinTech solution provider, we know it perfectly well how overwhelming it can get for you to choose from a plethora of technologies. To help you out with that, we have put together a list of top tools that can help you improve efficiency and build clients’ trust.
So this is how banks came into being. These financial institutions have evolved a lot over the years. And so have the payment methods that we currently use. Previously, we used to have checkbooks. Now, we use credit and debit cards.
Much of this innovation actually happened through the use of advanced technology. Banks have always stayed one step ahead and promoted the use of technology to add greater convenience for their customers. Today, we’re seeing a major change happening here thanks to advanced AI technologies that have been made available to the market today.
But how is AI actually aiding this Trillion Dollar industry? We’ve put together some points to answer this exact question.
1. Client Relationship Management (CRM)
According to a tech survey by Financial Planning, 91% out of 309 participants (financial advisors) reported that they use CRM.
If you aren’t using CRMs yet, you are missing out on all the plethora of conveniences that it brings into your life and your clients’ life. CRMs automate all the manual work that is usually susceptible to human errors such as keeping notes, keeping track of clients’ needs or financial goals, etc.
CRM provides you with a single yet customizable dashboard where you can manage multiple clients. You can store the contact information of your clients and even the scheduled or non-scheduled conversations with them. You can also automate all the documentation work for every client.
CRMs also provide your clients with complete transparency. Your clients get a separate panel where they can see all your efforts, keep tabs on their wealth management and expenses, taxes information, investments’ details, and more.
All in all, a good CRM can really make a difference in the life of financial advisors. When you search for high-performing and reliable CRMs, we recommend that you look for the following important features:
- Workflow automation
- Automate Documentation
- Data security
- International standard compliance
- Easy to use client and end-user panels
- Centralized dashboard
- Risk management
- Mobile access
BlueMind is one of the few leading CRMs that not only have all the must-to-have features but also utilizes AI for FNA, efficient recommendations and business analytics. Explore features here.
Related: Tips for Working Remotely as an Advisor
2. Video Conferencing Solutions
The global pandemic has forced people to coop themselves up in their home, further encouraging social distancing as a new norm. In times like these, your clients won’t be driving across town to discuss their financial plans with you. So, don’t expect prospects knocking at your office doors anytime soon. Yet, you can’t let any pandemic affect your business and make you lose clients.
To cater to your clients during lockdowns, you can use video conferencing tools or solutions. The need of video conferencing technologies had long been taken for granted in the pre-COVID era. However, VC has become the primary means of communication, keeping people and businesses connected even during the pandemic.
Pick a video conferencing tool that has the best video quality so can offer your client a real-life meeting experience. The tool should also offer screen sharing and collaboration feature. Google Meet, Zoom and Skype are most popular tools.
3. Email Marketing Automation Software
Whether you run a startup or a full-grown financial advisory company, an email marketing automation tool can go a long way in keeping you at the top of your clients’ mind.
One of the key aspects of a thriving business is to have a better relationship with their clients. Since you can’t email every client individually when your client-base is over a dozen or so, you can automate your emails to get rid of the manual labor.
With a single click, you can send your clients Easter or New Year’s wishes, company updates, current economic developments, and similar news updates. You can take your communications up a notch by scheduling reminder emails, prompting your clients for deadlines or coming meetings.
Email marketing automation tools can further assist you in reaching out to leads via drip campaigns and turn them into prospects and then loyal clients.
When picking out the right email automation tool for your business, make sure it offers auto responder feature, integration with your CRM, A/B testing, and email analytics such as how many users opened email, how many clicked, etc.
4. File Sharing Service
There’s a lot of paperwork involved in financial advisory business. You spend almost your entire day skimming files and other sensitive pieces of information. What makes it more hectic and dreading is to ensure the confidentiality of the information, especially when exchanging it with clients online.
A secure and reliable file sharing service can take that dread away, making you feel more confident when exchanging confidential files in-house or with your clients. You can set granular permissions along with added security features like two-factor authentication to fortify the security of your files.
You can also use it as a data storage service where you can store sensitive files, after making sure that the tool uses optimal data protection such as encryption. Further key features that you should look out for may include generous space, file recovery, user management, bank-grade encryption, and mobile accessibility.
5. Social Media Automation Tools
To survive and thrive in today’s cut-throat competition, you need to have a considerable presence in the digital world: The Internet. You can start with having a good social presence, where you can share your recent publications and posts that give readers insights into the industry and set you apart as an authority in the financial advisory sector.
To make the most of your social media accounts, you can use social handling tools. You can automate posts and even place a scheduler. You can even integrate your social automation tool with your website’s CMS, so your publications are posted as soon as you put them on your blog.
A good social handing tool can give you qualitative insights into where your audience is coming from, what content they like the most and such.
6. Account Aggregation Software
You can help your clients best when you have a complete picture of their finances. Lacking these crucial insights would mean half-baked financial strategies and, thus, unsatisfied clients.
Most of the times, clients fail to report their financial advisors about held-away assets which may include self-maintained trusts, retirement account, or health saving accounts. In fact, some assets may also include accounts that aren’t managed by the same advisor.
Keeping track of all the separate accounts of your clients can be a hassle, especially when the clients have multiple held-away assets. Here, you can use account aggregation tools to compile all those held-away assets at one place and manage them efficiently.
BlueMind is one of the few CRMs that aggregates and bring different features to one place so that you don't have to use multiple tools.
The job of financial advisors is not only complicated but also nerve-racking. The tools mentioned in this list can certainly help you simply the complications and manual labor to increase efficiency.
Comment below if we have missed any of the tech tools or you want to share your experience while using these tools.
Try BlueMind for Free
Explore All the BlueMind's features and see how it can simplify your operations, save time and increase your compliance.
