Introduction
You're listening to WealthTech on Deck, a podcast about the future of wealth management technology brought to you by SEI. Here's your host, Jack Sharry.
Jack Sharry
Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this week's edition of WealthTech on Deck. I spent a lot of time and effort over the past many years around understanding the confluence of digital and human advice. I've read a lot, had many conversations with experts on the topic of human and digital advice, and I've been a student of this phenomenon for these many years. At the end of the day, it's pretty simple and as complicated as using the human brain and some smart technology to help consumers and advisors make better decisions.
So many tools and capabilities and such a barrage of information and data need to come together to create what is commonly referred to as a tech stack, all of which is designed to help the investor and advisor achieve better results. And of late, I've been having many conversations with guests around how to assimilate all this to make better decisions so they can be made faster and easier and more comprehensively.
Today we're going to talk with Alicia Rich. Alicia is head of client and advisor digital enablement at Broadridge. Broadridge is a global fintech company that provides technology, insights, and infrastructure to businesses in the financial services industry. Their solutions include investor communications, capital markets, wealth management and corporate governance services. Broadridge's solutions help clients streamline operations, comply with regulations, and grow their businesses. Alicia and I are gonna understand what's going on in this space and how she and her colleagues can help both investors and the advisor enjoy a better peace of mind as well as improve financial outcomes. Alicia, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.
Alicia Rich
Thank you, Jack. I'm really happy to be here, excited for the conversation.
Jack Sharry
Yeah, it'll be fun. So Alicia, let's start with you describing your role at Broadridge. What does the head of client and advisor digital enablement do? Please fill our audience in on what you do, who you do it with and for, and how it all turns out. So tell us about what you do to enable the embrace of human and digital advice.
Alicia Rich
Well, the title is a mouthful and I'm sure it doesn't really give you a view of what it is. But basically, the way I look at it is I make the life of an advisor easier. My team and I, we design experiences that not only anticipate advisor needs and enable them to work smarter, but we want to remove the friction from the process. And we want them to be able to deliver meaningful experiences to their clients, the end investors.
Jack Sharry
So tell us a little bit about some of the pain points you encounter. What do you hear from investors and advisors and the firms around the digital experience? I know it's fraught with lots of opinion, having lived in this space for a little bit. So why don’t you talk about how that goes, what are the pain points, what do do about it? All that kind of stuff.
Alicia Rich
Sure. I think most people can resonate with this and they can relate to it. You have a question, you're trying to find some information. You might go online, you hit a dead end. Even worse, you go down a very deep rabbit hole. You chat or call a friend and you start to see that things are just so disjointed. You lose a little bit of trust, you feel a little lost. Maybe you feel like people don't really know who you are or what it is that you're looking for. Flip that to the advisor perspective. Here you are trying to build trust with your clients. You want to provide the best personalized advice that you can. But when you look at things and the tools that you use, they're just as fragmented. It's really hard to tell a complete story. And then what you share with the end client does also feel disjointed. That's the disconnect. That right there is what we're solving. We want to take the frustration out.
Jack Sharry
So why don’t you describe a little bit, if you would, the kinds of projects you work on or have worked on or are working on to give us a sense of some of the issues and opportunities to make it very real, because I think we can all relate to being frustrated with technology and frustrated with the experience. So give us a sense of some of the types of projects you do, how they've worked out, what wins, maybe some challenges. I'd love to hear about some of the specifics of what you encounter as you help advisors help their clients.
Alicia Rich
So I'll start with a couple of things that I'm excited about that are still in development, still in the works. One is we're focused on tools for growth. We've had a lot of conversation over the years about how to optimize and make things more efficient. Now we're really focused on how do we enable that growth. I take some of the current tools that we have today. We have tools that support client engagement and digital marketing. But the advisor doesn't get that full picture of their pipeline. They can't see how many times you've touched a particular client, how many times that there was an engagement, how many times something might have been shared across their network. It's difficult for them to then get a view of how am I doing? Where is the pipeline? Where should I be spending more time? Where should I focus? So we're taking tools like that at the core and we're connecting them more deeply to things like a CRM, to ways that they can manage the pipeline, that they could understand the metrics. And then we want to put a layer of analytics on top so that they can say, here's where I'm doing well. These are the messages that resonate. Here are other areas where I might want to try a message or might want to try to change the message a little bit if I don't think I'm hitting and landing with that communication. It’s a deep focus for us and we're really trying to see how do we pull together these siloed, disparate experiences so I can see a full view for my client and provide my client the advice across the full picture.
Jack Sharry
Why don’t you give us an example of what you're referring to when you talk about this, beyond the abstract of making it easier to engage, what are some actual projects or either in the making or already set that where you would be able to overcome some of these challenges?
Alicia Rich
So today we have a component that allows for digital engagement. We can share premium content. We can share educational content typically through social media, through email. And we are tracking, is somebody engaging with it? Are they reading it? Are they digging into it? But there's not a lot of automation through that process.
Jack Sharry
One of the things for our audience that may not know about Broadridge, you've got a very robust set of offerings around content development. Why don’t you maybe describe that? Because it sounds like what you're describing now is assuming that the advisor is pushing out the content that you provide and then it engages or hits or not. And then it sounds like where you're headed is toward the follow-up around the tracking and so on. So why don't you maybe fill some of that in for our audience.
Alicia Rich
Sure. So we have a series of tools today in our advisor solutions that help with digital marketing, digital engagement. Everything from building websites to providing content to put into those websites. We also have a component where we work with publishers like Wall Street Journal, different premium content publishers that we are able to license that content and when we deliver it, it's delivered without a paywall. So you can share an article with your advisors or with their broader, sorry, share an article with your clients, with your network, and they can share it more broadly, no one's gonna hit a paywall. And they're also gonna get an opportunity to see who is the advisor. So we allow them to showcase themselves in those messages and communications.
It's very powerful tool. There is a way to identify who's engaging and be able to tag those contacts that are engaging with your material and then automatically send them more that we think you might be interested in. So, Jack, if you read a couple of articles on retirement, I'm going to keep sending you a couple of other articles that are relevant.
The next level is to then say, okay, well, how can we start to talk about the ROI that that tool is now bringing back to your business. And so we're through an integrated data layer, which is also another really cool thing that I'm working on that maybe people don't think is as cool. With an integrated data layer, I can now take a look at your digital touch points, what you're engaging with, what's interesting to you. I could also take a look at how are we engaging from a product perspective? What other products are you subscribing to? And start to make an attribution between what I'm sharing and how I'm educating you with now what that means from a growth and a portfolio perspective.
Jack Sharry
So it's not unlike, if I could compare it to Amazon. If I buy something on Amazon, next thing you know, I'm getting a bunch of messages around things like that or other opportunities to purchase. Or Instagram where if I click on an ad and I check something out, I start to see, I know I looked at some kind of sleeveless vest not long ago and I see every sleeveless vest under the sun. So that's really what you're describing is not only that it's gonna start to feed the client the kind of information they want to get but they are also now going to translate that into an ROI, maybe talk a little bit more about how that ROI works.
Alicia Rich
From a metrics perspective and from an analytics perspective, when we have clients who are using multiple products with us, they're using our engagement tools, they're possibly using some of our back office components, using our compensation components.
We're able to tie that information together. We can follow that client through from their contacts on the engagement side through to the type of business that they're doing with the financial advisor. And that's how we pull this together to then present the ROI. So we're still in the early stages.
Clients using these products don't yet have this, but this is what we're working on right now so that we can bring back to them the benefits of the tools that they're using. We have a lot of conversations, mainly at the enterprise level, the firm management level. How do I know if the advisors use the tools that we're gonna get the outcomes that we're expecting? And ultimately, that's what we're trying to do. We want to show the benefits. I think theoretically, people understand that the benefit is there. The more you engage with clients, the more business they're going to do with you, the more they're going to trust you. This just helps give that proof point to the advisors and to their managers.
Jack Sharry
Of course, that presumes you're sharing stuff that they care about.
Alicia Rich
That’s true.
Jack Sharry
That's a cornerstone element is not only are you finding out what they pay attention to, care about, are spending time on but then as that ties into a potential sale or however you're doing the metrics you're really then saying, well and here's what it got you in terms of increased assets. I'm assuming this is where you're going, am I getting that right?
Alicia Rich
Yes, that's right. Yeah. And you're spot on. Another angle to the growth tools is having a better understanding of who your clients are. We've introduced the ability to capture certain preferences. So not just topics or tags of what's interesting to you, but we can actually take you through a survey that asks you more about your values. Are you concerned about animal welfare? Are you concerned about the environment? What else is important to you and to your overall picture? And that helps us more deeply personalize the content that we're sharing with you. And going back to one of my prior comments, I now start to see that this really is about me. This isn't a one size fits all message that many people received. It's truly tailored to me and to my financial picture, my goals, my life events.
Jack Sharry
And where are you in that trajectory? Because a lot of what you've described sounds like you have pieces of it and sounds like it's important to connect more dots, if you will. And there's probably just more stuff you haven't gotten to yet. But why don't you describe where are you in that journey in terms of really building a client profile, understanding what they care about. Also if you'd comment, I imagine this also rolls up to the enterprise level where they have a better sense of their client base and the sorts of products and services to be developed. But talk about how this plays out in decision making at least at the advisor and firm level.
Alicia Rich
Yeah, so the digital tools to deliver the content, that's all there. It's been in market for quite some time. We have thousands of advisors that are using those tools. When it comes to the automation, we have ways to quote unquote set it and forget it. It's going to follow who's engaging, what they're listening to, and continue to make more recommendations and automatically send out content to that base. We have connectivity with CRMs. So we are currently linking this to certain CRMs from a partner perspective, which is allowing us to have some of that tighter integration. And in parallel, we have the data layer that can connect all of these things. So over the next couple of months, our focus is going to be getting more of the surveys in place, allowing advisors to get more specific on the type of content that they're sharing. And I would say over the next six to nine months is when we will start to share the views of the ROI and how many of the contacts have you captured, what has that led to from a business perspective?
Jack Sharry
So what I'm hearing, and I pay close attention to these sorts of things, so I think I'm pretty spot on, and that is that you're to make each of these advisors into a mini Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Palmolive, Amazon, other great marketing companies in terms of their digital outreach, digital engagement, and then really understand their client in a much deeper, better way. So is that where the world's going? Tell us a little bit about where you see all this playing out over time.
Alicia Rich
So you're spot on. The way I look at it is it's not just about digital marketing. It is all about the engagement with the client. It's all about deepening that relationship. I think that the quote unquote martech part of the stack is increasingly becoming core to the overall experience and what the clients are expecting the advisors should be delivering. When I think about where this is going to go, you've seen a lot of digital co-pilots being launched and being introduced. They're going to continue to go out and not just transcribe meetings and set tasks and follow ups, but act more as a relationship management co-pilot or an intelligent assistant, helping the advisor make better recommendations, taking in all of the information that's coming from the different news outlets and different research areas, different analysts, looking at the different life events, triggers that might be coming from social media of what your clients are sharing and posting online, pulling that together to help the advisors have a better way to make decisions, to improve the engagement, and ultimately streamline tasks that today are very manual for the advisor and for their teams.
Jack Sharry
So a lot of what you described sound like what every good podcast must talk about, which is AI.
Alicia Rich
AI.
Jack Sharry
And so talk a little bit about that, not in the, that it's coming and it's gonna take over the world, and we’ll live happily ever after, whatever you might say in that regard. I think we're probably aligned around that. It's going to be a powerful tool. But one of the things I'm kind of interested in, you've touched on it a little bit, but I'd like to have you expand on it if you would. It's one thing to know the facts and figures of where people go and what they look at and all around selling stuff. And not a bad thing, but just, you know, that tends to be a lot of where that gets used.
But you also started talking about values, what matters to people. Talk a little bit, because in my mind's eye or my view, AI is going to be a lot more about the human aspect than just the data aspect. Not that data is going to be insignificant, it's going to be critical. But it's really much more about what the preference is, their inclinations, what their desires, what matters to them, family, the more elusive stuff, but the most important stuff in my view. So talk a little bit about that around the all important topic of AI.
Alicia Rich
Yeah. So yes, you can't have a podcast without talking about AI. Can't talk about wealth without it. And it goes to, it's not just AI or AI for AI's sake, right? There's really great use cases for how to use it, how to apply it. And what I'm seeing when talking to our clients and when just thinking through how do we want to advance our products, you have a ton of information about a person, about their family, and it's really hard for an individual to cull through all of that information for every single client that they have across their book of business. AI is helping do this at scale.
So I can take in lots of inputs about someone and not just the basic, know your client, what is their risk tolerance. What is their aversion to risk? But more personal than that and take a deeper look at who's important to Jack. He has children, he has grandchildren. What about his legacy is important? Where is it that he wants to spend time and attention? And having that as an input to how I talk to Jack about what he needs to do next or how I talk to Jack about how he has to curb his spending habits because he's got very important and very big goals. That's where I see that AI starts to be that differentiator for advisors. It brings to light information that might be buried very, very deep that they might not have enough time to dig into on their own and allows us to bring it to the top of the funnel for them.
Jack Sharry
So I'm going to dig in a little bit deeper on that because I think that's the wonder of AI is to really get to know the human being. I think that's fundamental to it because it's one thing to know data. There's plenty of data. There's some repository, I hear it's in Arkansas, wherever the heck it is that has every bit of data on me. They’ve got me upside down and backward on data. I'm sure you have access to that sort of stuff just because you can probably buy it off the shelf, I'm assuming, but, or at least what I hear. But it's interesting, I just went through personally went through a planning exercise recently and we really got into the important stuff and some of which we didn't know until we got into it. We knew, but the depth of it or the importance of it really became clear as we went through the process. So I'd love to hear your views on AI in that regard. My sense is AI will just really get to know a person just because all the stuff they can find out about Alicia Rich or Jack Sharry that is just readily available, but AI can also start to put you together. So what really matters to Alicia or Jack? What matters to their families? What matters to their children, grandchildren, and so on? So talking a bit about that, I think that's really, in my view, that's where AI is going to lead us.
Alicia Rich
I think you're spot on. It is going to take us to a place where I can have a deeper conversation with you because I'm very prepared for that conversation. It can also, depending on how you're going to use and apply those models, I can see a world where I'm going to take input from how I prepare Jack for a conversation with Alicia. And the next time he has a conversation with someone slightly similar to Alicia, I can now feed into that and not just feed into what about them, but what are the potential actions that they can take and what actions do you think will be more successful? What tasks will be more successful with Alicia? And as you start to get more into how does she think, how does she make decisions, you can start to tailor, right, how you're gonna talk to her. How do you prepare her? Is she the type of person that wants to read information before she walks into a room? Or would she rather have a session where you're going to explain things to her and then give her stuff that she can walk away and read with? It's a big difference when talking to somebody about things so emotional like their investments and their legacy. Preparing for that conversation, knowing how to talk to them based on the behaviors that they have. Those are things that sometimes people take for granted, and I think AI is really gonna help with that and help people enter those conversations much more prepared than they might be on their own.
Jack Sharry
Many years ago now, but someone mentioned there's a few intimate topics we don't talk about in polite company. I'll just keep it focused on money for now. There's a couple others you might guess that we just don't talk about out loud.
Alicia Rich
That’s right.
Jack Sharry
And one of those is money. Like no one says, hey, Alicia, how much do you make? It's just one of the things we don't do. Or how much is in your investment account? It's just not done, right? And so it's one of those intimate touchy subjects that people aren't comfortable on either side, talking about it or asking about it. But I think, again, you've laid it out here, but I'm curious how you're orienting this to make this an easier conversation. Because at the end of the day, in my own personal circumstances, met with an advisor, spent a lot of time getting all the facts and figures and data together, did an extensive financial plan, all the pieces. I'm mindful of all the stuff we're talking about. I was trying to give my point of view. So as my wife and I sat down, we just have different points of view on the topic. How she thinks about it, how I think about it are different. And it was interesting. The planner, he was a part of a team and he was a, he's a planner geek. He knows this stuff really good, really good. And he kept talking to me. And then I would talk to my wife and say, what he just said is, and then I would explain what he just said. And then we'd go back to it and then he'd talk to me again and then I'd explain and I was sort of he's a younger guy and really smart, really just the right person we needed he just didn't understand that how he talked to me and how he talked to my wife were different and he would be well advised to learn how to talk to my wife since frankly with I think decisions are made, 70% of financial decisions are made by the female member of house or relationship. So I'd love to hear your comments on how AI will start to inform that kind of where you're talking to the right people about the right stuff.
Alicia Rich
So there are a couple of players in the space that are focused on that. And that idea of the decision maker, or the co-decision maker is an important area that they're spending some time and focus on. Because it is important to make sure that you are talking to the family, not just to one person in the family. So the players in the space, they have a combination of behavioral science backing them as well as the machine learning artificial intelligence, which is pulling together the model that can help advisors with conversation starters. So I can look at a portfolio. I can look at the proposal that the advisor is trying to make the input of the decision maker and the co-decision maker and more about their preferences, more about their behavior, then helps shape the narrative. How do I enter the conversation? And again, going back to a comment I made about being prepared for how to share the information with them both, it can outline step by step, you're going to want to give Alicia five days to review this material before she walks into the meeting. You're going to want to address these concerns right off the bat. You're going to want to give her time to think about it and you're going to want to follow up, right? Like so truly structuring that conversation, trying to identify, this is her personality type, this is how she's going to potentially react, and here's what she's going to need to get to a decision. Not that she's going to necessarily get to the decision that you want, but this is how you take her through a process to get to a decision. And then how do the two play against each other, right? So there's a lot of brain power behind these concepts. And I do see that these are the types of things that are going to help advisors. They're not trained psychologists. Some of them probably are, right? And some of them probably have had enough…
Jack Sharry
Not many that I’ve met. I say that respectfully.
Alicia Rich
But that's the rub. They're in a people business. They're in a relationship business. It's not about a sale of product. It's about really understanding people. And that's what we can do. We can give them that. We can prepare them so that they can have those conversations and be able to handle different views and different personality types.
Jack Sharry
It's interesting as part of the exercise I just described, going, doing the planning and so forth. Clearly the planner, the advisor team, they're all about the portfolio. And that's important too. But for me, I'm a set it and forget it kind of… I don't trade, I don't. I don't do anything crazy. I know my risk tolerance and I know how to get there. And frankly, I know how to do it more inexpensively. What I want is guidance and advice and so on. But the guidance and advice I seek was it had more to do with where I was going to live and how I was going to spend more time with my children and grandchildren. That was what the advice, and it was around real estate and about selling a home or buying, you know, there's all part of the discussion. And they kept wanting to talk about the portfolio. And I go, the portfolio will come after we decide where we're going to live, what our lifestyle is going to be, and how we're going to spend more time with our children and the expenses that we're going to, the investments, if you will, and what we're going to do in terms of making it attractive to come visit us. That's what I care about. Now, I've been around a little bit, so I was able to guide them there. But their inclination was to guide me toward the portfolio. And I basically just said, that's not, I said, we'll get there. It doesn't matter to me. I'm going to buy high quality models at low cost. Taxes are important, I want to talk to you about that. But let's first decide where we're going to live, how we're going to lead our lives. It sounds to me like you're going to be able to with the tools that you have and will have are around getting at the right conversation with that particular client.
Alicia Rich
Absolutely, the conversation is very important. Preparing the advisor for those conversations, just bringing to the top what are the key things they need to focus on and pay attention to. And to your example, it's not just about the investment. It's about the security. It's about understanding, am I able to achieve these goals?
Jack Sharry
Sure, absolutely. So Alicia, this has been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Any key takeaways you'd like to leave with our audience as we look to say sayonara?
Alicia Rich
Oh, geez, we did talk about a lot. Thank you, Jack. I appreciate it. I think one thing that people really need to continue to remember is digital advice is not just about technology and technology replacing a human. We really focus on removing that friction.
We want humans to do the best work that they can. And how do we do that? And how do we enable that? And I feel that, when we look at this current wave of where we are, it's not that advisors and their clients are asking for more tools. They just want better experiences. They want a way to make better decisions. And so when firms are thinking about how to go down this path, how to achieve that strategy, they just need to be thinking about a smarter way to orchestrate the tools. How do they orchestrate the data? And how do they better understand the mindset? Mindset of investor, mindset of advisor, just putting all of that together before thinking through, do I really need this one tool? Is that really the best investment?
Jack Sharry
Gotcha. So our final question, my favorite always, what do you do outside of work that people might find interesting or surprising that you're particularly excited, passionate about? Tell us about what you do when you're not enabling investors and advisors.
Alicia Rich
Well, my husband and my two puppies, we have a little travel camper. And so we like to find places off the main roads and hang out and find adventures. So we're gearing up for that time of year where we can get back out on the road and trying to figure out what's the next place.
Jack Sharry
And all over, or in the area where you live?
Alicia Rich
Mainly close to home, but we'll be venturing out a little bit further. I want to check out the Blue Ridge Mountains this summer. So, so yeah. A little bit more exploring. Still close to home, but not, you know.
Jack Sharry
Yeah, yeah, little change of scenery, little fresh air and all the rest.
Alicia Rich
That’s right.
Jack Sharry
So, terrific. So, Alicia, thanks so much. I enjoyed our conversation. I actually feel like I'm coming to understand AI. So thank you for that.
Alicia Rich
Awesome.
Jack Sharry
For our audience, if you've enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we're doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We're available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All of our episodes are there, along with blogs and creative content that come from many folks around the industry. Alicia, thanks again. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.
Alicia Rich
Thanks a lot, Jack. I appreciate it.
Host
Thanks for listening to this episode of WealthTech on Deck, our ongoing conversation about improving financial outcomes for all. This podcast is brought to you by SEI and produced by Turncast. Subscribe to future episodes in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can connect with our host, Jack Sharry, on LinkedIn. For more information about our perspective on the future of financial advice, visit our website at wealthtechondeck.com
