The proliferation of financial technology solutions over the last decade should be understood in terms of four stages: growth, consolidation, adoption, and integration. The last stage, integration, is now playing out on the advisor desktop and the client portal, collapsing the functional distinctions in many respects.

While portal capabilities increasingly mirror those available to the advisor, the requirements of the investor are distinct. Ease of navigation, operational control, analytics, and context-rich delivery are investors’ baseline expectations, as are robust tools for aggregation, money movement, tax management, and other core functions. Dissatisfaction with their wealth manager’s client portal is driving investors off-platform. The client portal offers the potential to enhance the user experience and decipher investor behavior on the wealth management platform in ways that will add remarkable value to the client relationship; in short, to serve as a transformational agent for investor insight and advisor efficiency.

Key questions discussed in this report:

• How can the investor portal support better client understanding and engagement?
• What are the key functional and user experience gaps in client portals today?
• How can the portal be designed to increase client self-service and align advisor workflows for greater efficiency?
• What threats do third-party tools pose to investor adoption of client portals?

Companies Mentioned:

Agreement Express, Avaloq, BehaviorQuant, Black Diamond, Capitect, Carson Financial, Charles Schwab, CircleBlack, DocuSign, Edward Jones, Envestnet, Fidelity Investments, Google, IBM, InvestCloud, LPL Strategic Wealth Services, Mint, MoneyGuide, Pershing, Personal Capital, PreciseFP, RBC, Salesforce, TD Ameritrade, VISE