Advisers are going to become concierges to their clients financial lives according to Sandy Kaul, head of digital asset and investor advisory services at Franklin Templeton.
Speaking at the NextWealth conference this week (March 19), Kaul discussed how advisers will soon be helping clients to broaden their social identities through their financial plans and portfolios.
She said: “We are now seeing advisers being tasked with thinking about their client’s entire financial life and not just their investment portfolio.
“Are they ready for retirement? Are they looking at the right type of insurance? Do they have plans for their tax obligations?
“These are all starting to come under the umbrella of an adviser’s mandate and requires a more holistic approach.
"We’re moving from being a product centric to a service centric industry and you’re seeing this show up through the implementation of the consumer duty.”
Kaul said technology has helped the advisory market to think about their clients interests holistically to create a “journey-based” approach.
She said: “We are entering the period where baby boomers are beginning to retire and this will continue through the early 2030s. There has also been a significant change in how we think about a client’s financial picture when they are in accumulation and decumulation.
“We are now really thinking about looking at our clients profile and their needs and building a solution based on these.”
Technology and AI
Kaul said the industry is going to be able to use tools like AI to create a degree of personalisation for clients that make them feel they are getting an “even better service”.
“Using Chat GPT I will be able to take a look at my client’s portfolios and get the AI to write up a personalised report about how their portfolio has been affected by the market with very little effort.
“Client profiles will become an increasingly important and valuable tool to an adviser because the better and the richer the profile, the more the AI tools are going to be able to personalise the clients service and so the better an adviser's suggestions will become,” she explained.
Kaul said soon advisers will be able to film avatars of themselves and embed chatbots into them to to interact with clients for simple and mundane tasks.
“Advisers will be able to go from servicing a couple hundred clients to thousands because they are going to free up so much time by using these new tools,” she added.
Generational shift
Kaul pointed out society is going through a huge generational change as the younger generations are having very different life experiences to baby boomers.
She said: “On average a baby boomer stayed in a job for eight years, now for Gen Z the average is around two years, so it is very hard for them to get onto the occupational retirement savings path.
“The younger generation also wants sustainable investments as well as digital investments.”
Kaul said this generational shift is already playing into how investment products are now being built.
“We’re not just talking about risk adjusted returns anymore, we’re now talking about societal goals, clients want to measure the carbon impact of their portfolios or they want to see the increase in the diversity of board representation of the companies in their portfolios."
“Advisers are now being asked to not only deliver financial returns but also non financial returns,” she added.
Kaul highlighted she was seeing a surge in engagement with online platforms that cater to a “social style” of investing.
She said: “Millennials and Gen Z are getting their information from social media, they want gamification when they are engaging, they want social sharing and participation.
“These are all the triggers that keep people addicted to social media and the younger generation is looking for the same in their investment experience and in the experience with their adviser.”
Kaul said society was entering a “third era” of wealth management and investing called “better living”.
She said: “Not only are clients going o be able to look for societal justice in their portfolios, they will be able to gain personal enrichment from them because of tokenisation.”
Kaul said tokenisation will allow clients to make assets programmable to what they enjoy and want and embed this into their portfolios.
“This means an adviser's role becomes even more critical. They will become the concierge that is going to open up a world of opportunities to clients by not only helping them to put together a portfolio but help them define what benefits they want from it."
alina.khan@ft.com
