Technology can help advisers deliver a personal service to their clients, Pershing's Maarten Heukshorst has said.
Mr Heukshorst, Pershing's chief relationship officer, said it was not necessarily true that using digital processes meant advisers would have to sacrifice their personal relationships with their clients.
He said: "Technology can help with delivering a personalised service because through e-delivery you can, for example, now live chat.
"The live chat can be not with a call centre, anonymous, it can be with the relationship manager and the adviser who comes and visits you once a year or twice a year. The live chat can be with an account manager that has been allocated to you.
"There is no reason why advisers can't deliver a personalised service through a digital medium.
"In addition to that I think the power of digital and e-deliver for that matter is the fact that advisers can deliver content, and relevant content in a much simpler fashion, a much more cost effective fashion, and much more immediate."
Mr Heukshorst added that advisers could no longer assume their clients were not interested in using technology to manage their finances just because they tended to be older.
He said client expectations were changing when it comes to how they interact with their advisers.
Mr Heukshorst said: "The typical client of an adviser or wealth manager is at least digital savvy if not already digital native. Increasingly people and consumers live their life online and rather than talking digital it is probably even more relevant to talk mobile.
"There isn't a single consumer-facing industry, to my knowledge, which has not delivered the ability for consumers to have access to online information."
damian.fantato@ft.com
