Modern financial advisor firms rely on a variety of technologies to run their businesses.
Connecting data through CRM, financial planning, and accounting platforms ensures that an advisory business runs seamlessly. Integrating these technologies, though, can be a big challenge.
I caught up with Kartik Srinivasan, managing director of 3rd party integrations at Charles Schwab at this year's T3 event. He shared some insights on how advisors can take the steps necessary to tackle and smooth out their integration challenges. Click on the video below to watch the full interview.
Transcript:
One of the big challenges facing financial advisors is something that's very near and dear to my heart since I manage third-party integrations at Schwab. There's always a problem and a challenge with integrations. We know that advisors increasingly use many different pieces of technology. The larger you are as a firm, you could have as many as 1,520 different pieces of technology. Integrating those technologies can be a big challenge.
We do know that with integrated data, advisors can get a lot of benefits and efficiency. They don't need to re-enter information, they can have workflow automation. That's a big challenge and we're looking to solve that with my team here at Schwab. What we do is we offer advisors a variety of integration capabilities, whether it is APIs or data – through partnerships with third-party technology providers. We're making it easier for advisors to take their Schwab data connected with their CRM, financial planning, accounting, and all these other systems, and then ensure that they're able to run their business seamlessly.
An action item that advisors can take is, first of all, to evaluate all the technology that you have. You might be using a lot of technology and you haven't turned on the integrations that they have with each other or with the custodian.
I would say that the first step is to do an inventory of all the technology tools that you have and find out how integrated they are. If you find that they're not integrated, they operate in a silo, maybe it's time to evaluate other options. That's the first thing I would do – look at what you have, see how it's integrated, and then take the steps necessary to up your integration game.