Fintech providers need to find a balance between what’s new and what works, eMoney Advisor’s new CEO Ed O’Brien said at the eMoney Advisor Summit this week.
“Innovation is great” when it’s fast, he said, “but it has to be precise and accurate to help financial advisors remain compliant in such a highly regulated industry.”
Drew DiMarino, head of sales for eMoney, noted at the conference in Orange County, Calif. that, since 2010, $50 billion has been invested in fintech companies. “Fintech is exploding,” he said.
O’Brien said although a wave of integrations in the industry is driving advisor productivity, simply counting the number of integrations a financial institution offers isn’t enough to distinguish it as tech-driven. “Most advisors are now telling us that it’s not the number, it’s ‘What does that integration do? How does it make me a better advisor?’” he said.
He added there are 30 integrations on eMoney’s emX platform and “20 of them are select integrations that are really deep integrations.”
O’Brien said, “We want to make sure we have the right” technology partners, “but from there, how we think about the workflows that are integrated, the touch points and the next generation, that’s all coming directly from our client base.”
As an overall philosophy, O’Brien noted, “Planning-led advice is probably the future of this business. Leading with performance probably isn’t how advisors will interact with clients in meetings in the future.”
O’Brien said most customer agreements probably say data belongs to the end client. “Is this industry ready for a wave of governance around data?” he asked. “I think yes.” Data has been freely passed around the industry, he said. “What happens when the client leaves you? I would fall back to it’s that client that owns it.”
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