When financial advisors enter into a new client relationship, they don’t immediately start investing their clients’ assets. They don’t jump into creating a holistic financial plan. And they don’t start spewing solutions to generic problems.
That would be absurd.
Instead, good financial advisors get to know their clients. They ask questions. They learn their goals, motivations and fears. Then and only then do they begin crafting a financial plan and proposing solutions to clients’ financial challenges.
Real solutions are born from a deep understanding of user needs and existing pain points. But often wealthtech providers settle for a surface-level perception of what advisors think they want, rather than working to identify the actual problems and address their root challenges.
The Problem With Wealthtech Today
Financial advisors have no shortage of technology offerings to choose from. Innovators in every corner of the advisory space are working to equip advisors with cutting-edge features, help them differentiate their practices and create efficiency in their daily workflows to achieve better client outcomes.
The problem is that these systems aren’t typically built to play nicely together, forcing advisors to juggle multiple windows, platforms and data, cluttering and confusing their daily operations. The manual overload steals time and focus away from what they do best: serving clients.
Well-intentioned as these technologies may be, they often miss the mark for the end user. Diseased with feature bloat and disconnected updates that fail to consider the user’s comprehensive digital journey, haphazard innovations can do more harm than good for the advisors’ experience and their client relationships.
Haphazard innovations can do more harm than good for the advisors’ experience and their client relationships.
Wealthtech that has been designed to measure accumulated wealth, communicate risk as measures of probability and report progress toward goals against benchmarks may do a fantastic job at all of the above, but confuse and frustrate your firms’ clients because of a lack of understanding of how they want to visualize their financial picture. That’s a big miss – and a big opportunity for tech leaders, CTOs and advisors ready to think differently about the future of advisor technology.
We believe the foundation for truly innovative wealthtech is more human than machine. It’s an approach that puts people at the center of software development: design thinking.
The Inherent Intentionality Behind Design Thinking
In many ways, design thinking is how good advisors already work with their clients: They talk about what’s important to them, get to the root of their existing financial challenges and design plans to meet those needs and aspirations.
In software development, design thinking is a framework that prioritizes human-centric problem solving. It involves putting yourself in users’ shoes, understanding their underlying motivations and uncovering their root needs to create effective solutions. By empathizing with the person behind the screen, design thinking encourages financial services technologists to look for solutions that help advisors serve the whole client.
In contrast to traditional methods of software development – in which linear, systematic processes reign supreme – design thinking brings intentionality to a solution-oriented approach.
If you’re familiar with software development methodologies, then you may already know how design thinking can be applied to wealthtech. User story cards are agile tools that help software development teams “spec” out features for their applications. These cards identify the type of user the feature is being developed for, what they want and why they want it. An author, typically the product owner, sets about writing these stories like a mad lib: As a ____, I would like to ____, so that I can ____.
When features are introduced to a software application with this kind of rigor and empathy, software is much more likely to be developed intentionally, with the end user’s needs placed squarely at the center of the process. This also helps prevent feature bloat!
For example, we introduced a new feature to the Summit application in 2022 called Wealth Journey. A story card for this feature could read like this: As a wealth owner, I would like to see a timeline of all of the beautiful experiences and milestones my family and I have enjoyed together, so that we can be reminded that the experiences are what matter, and the money is just a means, not the end goal.
When it comes to building the empathy and understanding that enable design thinking and human-centric software development, good, clean data influences every decision.
The Role Of Data In Human-Centric Design
Design thinking does not mean ignoring the significance of data. In fact, data should inform critical design decisions.
Design thinking does not mean ignoring the significance of data.
The emergence of data lake capabilities presents an opportunity for product designers to leverage unstructured data like photos, videos and audio files, providing a deeper look into user behavior and preferences in a faster and more flexible and scalable way. Not only do data lakes power more seamless cross-team collaboration, but unstructured data storage allows for detailed segmentation of user data, allowing creators to use data in ways they couldn’t before.
This ability to analyze data more comprehensively gives developers unique insight into individual user journeys, which builds empathy and leads to more user-friendly experiences. Meaningful data analysis is, therefore, a key part of the design thinking process – and is critical to creating human-centered experiences.
Driving Human-Centered Technology Experiences
Anthony Sperling and I were inspired to found Summit in 2019 because of our own experiences as clients of wonderful RIAs, which afforded us a unique perspective on the tech they were using to serve us. As fintech veterans, we thought we knew why our digital experiences were so lacking. But since we’d been out of the industry for a number of years, we weren’t confident yet that our thesis was airtight.
Our first step was to call on old friends and colleagues in the industry to interview them about their pain points with the wealthtech they depended on daily. Their stories were remarkably similar: The tech they were using wasn’t doing the job(s) they needed it to do. As a result, they were employing so many manual workarounds in Excel and PowerPoint that these projects were stealing time from the important and meaningful work: serving their clients.
I tell this story to illustrate that the most critical element in design thinking is your stakeholders. The goal should be to find out what their pain points are and then design solutions.
We collect user feedback through surveys, questionnaires, usability testing, user-based tracking and interviews. We get to know advisors through these means to figure out the paths they need to walk, how they need to organize data and the calculations they need to run. This helps us match our solutions to what they’re trying to accomplish – instead of the other way around.
Empathy, collaboration and a solution-first mindset are critical ingredients to delivering human-centric platforms that create meaningful client connections.
Reed Colley is CEO and Co-Founder of Summit, a provider of technology solutions for wealth operating systems.
