My most recent report, Due North: Harnessing Desktop Technology to Serve the Canadian Adviser, looks at how Canadian banks and other wealth managers can use desktop technology to simultaneously empower advisers and improve service delivery to the end client.

How It Works

As I note, the concept of desktop extends far beyond the simple adviser “dashboard.” Rather, it suggests the coordinated deployment of an array of front end tools in the service of the adviser.

Desktop technology enforces data sharing across financial planning, portfolio management, rebalancing, and other adviser-focused instrument. Equally important to the adviser, it manages the transmission of information from client touchpoint into the workflow and back. A major benefit is the elimination of multiple sign ons and rekeying.

Devil in the Data

Successful management of data is key to success in the increasingly digitized wealth management business. As such, firms are pouring critical budget dollars into the creation of centralized data warehouses. While designed to serve as a golden record or single source of truth, too often these data marts are simply data dumps, with little benefits in terms of client analytics.

Increasingly, firms are investing in semantic enhancements that classify data according to usability or value, rather than by attributes such as a tag or name. Future research will explore in detail the ways machine-learning technologies are remaking conceptions of the Hadoop-based data mart and the abilities of firms to anticipate the needs of their customers.