DWN staff
The most successful businesses run on processes that maximize all of the firm’s operational components: human capital, technologies, procedures and leadership. Such optimization is an outgrowth of integration. When a firm’s essential growth drivers are not working together and executing seamlessly, it represents missed opportunities today and for the future.
The larger the firm, the greater the number of workflows to be managed … as well as their complexities. Ongoing innovation exacerbates the challenge, as outdated technologies turn over quickly. And, those firms pursuing inorganic, M&A-forward growth face particular headwinds in the form of integrating disparate systems into one unified platform.
Sam Kendree, CEO & Co-Founder at WealthFeed, an AI-powered prospecting and client-engagement platform for financial advisors, says, “Seamless integration is everything. We all know the feeling of getting a new app: you are excited, you spend 30 minutes learning it and you love it. But once that honeymoon phase ends, if the tool is not built into your existing habits and automated within your workflow, it becomes very hard to consistently get value from it. Integration is what turns initial enthusiasm into lasting adoption and real business outcomes.”
For RIAs and other wealth management organizations, integration is a critical priority for firms due to challenges created over time as the industry has evolved. Legacy systems, proprietary platforms, intense M&A/acquisition activity and diverse software implementations that address the needs of specific workflows (such as CRM, tax planning, compliance, etc.) complicate the process.
Jon Ewing, Chief Marketing Officer at Docupace, a provider of AI-enabled back-office and compliance software for wealth management firms, says, “From a technology perspective, wealth management is very siloed. There are lots of point solutions that all work well, but don’t necessarily work well together. Workflow, or orchestration, is the ability to build ‘meta-processes’ – streams of automated or semi-automated work that bounce between multiple tech solutions, multiple data silos and multiple people. This type of orchestration drives both efficiency and repeatability and prevents things from falling through the cracks.”
Cracking the code
Wealth management companies have many moving parts. Addressing the integration challenge hinges on bringing these diverse elements together to form a smooth, end-to-end process-management framework. Choosing the right integration partner can be the difference between meaningful, stable scalability and ongoing efficiency challenges at both the enterprise and advisor level.
Kendree observes, “Advisors already have too many tools to manage, so the last thing they want is another standalone system competing for attention. The real value comes from integration: connecting data and tools so insights surface across the entire stack rather than living in a silo. A single pane of glass makes more sense every day, especially as firms lean into AI, which is only as valuable as the data and tools it can access.”
In an ecosystem of increasingly complex product solutions and the democratization of previously restricted investment options, such as private equity, private credit, digital assets and other alts, having proper compliance guardrails in place is an imperative – and this means more than oversight. Firms are focusing on embedding education, compliance resources and training directly into advisor workflows, and are working with specialists to ensure all the bases are covered in order to avoid costly errors.
Jason Roberts, CEO of Pension Resource Institute (PRI), a platform that delivers compliant solutions to financial institutions serving retirement investors, says, “As compliance specialists, clients are licensing our compliance infrastructure, including agreements, disclosures and policies, as well as advisor- and client-facing content that frequently changes based on new legislation, regulations or even trends in litigation and enforcement. Enterprises look for us to curate, communicate and provide subject matter expertise on constantly shifting requirements. Integrating with a trusted partner is critical given the steep penalties for non-compliance under ERISA and Department of Labor rules.”
What to look for
Selecting integration partners across a broad range of solutions is a science, and it begins with understanding what seamless integration looks like in daily practice for your given situation and needs. Working with a firm that can grow with you is essential – you don’t want to have to revisit the partner search process repeatedly. You are looking for a long-term relationship that benefits you both, captures the attributes that are important to you and can keep pace with industry trends.
Docupace’s Ewing states, “Workflows are only as good as the data on which they operate. In an ideal world, businesses would operate a ‘single source of truth’ data layer that was integrated, complete and consistent – but this is hard, expensive technical work to create and maintain… automated workflows need to incorporate extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities to ensure that the data pulled from one system can be converted to match the data in a second system. Think, for example, about something as simple as date formats – some systems use “MM/DD/YYYY” and some use DD MMMM, YYYY. These basic differences break ‘vanilla’ integrations between platforms. ETL tools clean, standardize and translate information before it moves between systems.”
Conducting the proper due diligence to assess the best integration partner is essential, and that includes being clear up front about the very nature of the partnership. PRI’s Roberts says, “It’s about buy-in from the top down. If our primary contact is the compliance department, we tend to see less willingness to make more content and resources available to all advisors. In that case, we are viewed as an extension of their team and not as a firmwide partner. When we are regularly engaged with sales leaders and those in charge of strategic direction and growth, our materials tend to be widely embedded in both internal workflows and external communications.”
When firms are assessing a prospective partner’s ability to support their integration needs successfully across the enterprise, the breadth and depth of the research process matter. Kendree says, “Look past the LinkedIn posts and marketing for real, at-scale success with enterprises, plus an in-house tech team with the experience to back it up. Then dig into the data. We deliberately focus on quality over quantity instead. We curate 100 million-plus high-value prospects, then enrich those prospects with property data, affluence insights, mailing addresses and warm introduction paths. Ultimately, advisors need confidence that the data powering their prospecting work is accurate and actionable at every step.”
The Future of Integration
As firms look to embed more functionality directly into advisor workflows, Roberts notes, “I anticipate we will see more demand for ‘portable’ resources as AI and enhancements in technology allow smaller firms to build out capabilities that were previously too costly or time consuming.”
In a dynamic industry, firms must take a long-term view when it comes to maximizing tech capabilities. Integration can exponentially increase tech’s impact, but only if firms view their tech investments through a lens that focuses on innovation and the flexibility to pivot in response to industry trends and their own needs.
“If the industry begins to understand the importance of data governance in the age of AI, integration along with standardized and synchronized data will no longer play second fiddle to front-office technology concerns,” says Ewing. “It will become the backbone of a wealth tech stack – with one client update in System A instantly propagating across all platforms. No more rekeying. That’s a future we can all look forward to.”
There is a growing, industry-wide emphasis on organic growth among both large and small wealth management firms – and integration is poised to play a large role. Kendree says, “Integrated data ecosystems will be the backbone of enterprise organic growth, generating value not just across an advisor’s clients and tools, but across the entire firm. A strong ecosystem makes it easier to deliver the right touchpoint at the right time, improving the client experience while removing manual work so advisors can focus on meaningful conversations. That said, AI and data ecosystems are only as strong as their underlying infrastructure and data accuracy, which is why choosing the right partner matters.”
