The Future of Wealth Management: Practifi’s Vision for an AI-Powered CRM
If any one thing has been constant in our lives over the past few years, it’s change; JFK famously called change the “law of life”. And yet in some ways change feels more constant now than it ever has, particularly for us working in technology but also for wealth management more broadly.
The meteoric rise of AI has begun to reshape the working world, enabling levels of productivity that a few years ago would have seemed impossible to most of us. Suddenly, time-consuming tasks like capturing notes and writing emails are handled in an instant, freeing advisors up to focus on the advising and relationship-building that brought them into the profession originally.
It’s an exciting time for sure, but it’s also a time of great uncertainty; as the universe of what’s possible keeps expanding, RIAs are quite rightly wondering what the tech stack of the future might look like, and the role their CRM will play in it. Here at Practifi we’ve been watching closely, listening to clients and fine-tuning our approach.
Practifi is committed to delivering the most AI-enabled and AI-integrated vertical CRM to RIAs. We want to lean into the amazing possibilities of AI while providing tangible value to our clients. So, here’s a look into what we’re delivering this year to help realize our vision of the AI-powered CRM of the future.
AI will enhance advisor expertise, not replace it
Before we dive into our approach, it’s important to understand where we see AI taking the advice sector as a whole, after all JFK’s very next line was, “those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”. And we see some pretty serious headwinds on the horizon:
- Even as of 2023 roughly 40% of Americans were willing to trust AI systems1. We expect that number will continue to increase, particularly with the Great Wealth Transfer leaving money in the hands of investors far more comfortable with technology.
- As AI models continue to get better, they’ll be capable of delivering advice in areas where trusted experts have historically been required, such as law and accounting. Financial advice isn’t immune to this.
In short, we expect AI to be capable of dispensing meaningful investment advice, and we expect investors to be willing to trust it. It’s tempting to write off this possibility given the hype cycle we all saw with robo-advisors, but AI is emphatically not a robo-advisor, it will ultimately be capable of producing highly personalized recommendations that account for an investor’s financial situation, life goals and personality quirks, and it will keep up with market movements better than any human ever could.
Does that mean we’re predicting “the end of advice” or something similarly dramatic? Not even close. Because while the above might be true, advisors have something up their sleeve that no AI can ever possess: the ability to spark a genuine connection with the client on the other end and become a trusted companion who sits alongside them as they ride the rollercoaster of life.
This understanding is fundamental to how we see the role of the CRM changing over time. In an increasingly competitive environment where advisors differentiate by building great client relationships, CRMs own the R(elationships) from a technology standpoint and will ultimately be responsible for supporting advisors in their quest for relationship greatness. As such, our goal with AI is to make great relationships your firm’s superpower, making your future less about uncertainty and more about growth and potential.
A roadmap that goes back in time
So, how are we going to do this, exactly? The first area we’re focusing on is a simple one: giving you back more time in your day. We believe that advisors and their support teams already do a pretty great job of building relationships when they get the opportunity, it’s just that a lot of their time is spent on busy work in systems that should do a much better job of working for them instead. Here’s some of the ways we’re planning to give you back more time:
- A conversational setup experience that takes the heavy lifting out of configuring and customizing the various features that put Practifi to work for your firm, including workflows, deliverables, automation and more.
- One-click client summaries that pull various data points together into a clear and concise one-pager. Great for catching up on recent activity, or doing some last-minute meeting prep.
- Recommended follow-up actions for meetings and emails, including launching workflows and updating client data. Even better, you’ll have access to these insights directly from Outlook.
- Suggested record matches when syncing data with other systems, significantly speeding up the time it takes to link clients and accounts between the two.
Of course this is in addition to the great partnerships we’ve been forging with AI-first vendors such as Jump and Zocks, who are also doing great things in this space.
The best is yet to come
There’s a lot more we’re thinking about beyond the four areas I’ve mentioned here, particularly when you start looking beyond efficiency alone and more toward ways AI can augment the advisor/client relationship directly. Building great relationships is all about saying the right things at the right time and in the right way, and we have some great ideas on how we can leverage AI to make that possible for you.
That’s a topic for another day though, for now I’m excited enough about the transformative potential of the road right in front of us. Hopefully you are too, and I can’t wait to see where it takes your firm in the year to come.
Our approach to an AI-powered CRM.
Learn more1Gillespie, N., Lockey, S., Curtis, C., Pool, J., & Akbari, A. (2023). Trust in Artificial Intelligence: A Global Study. The University of Queensland and KPMG Australia. 10.14264/00d3c94
