A rush of data that helps you interpret trends and understand behavior is great. A fire hose of data that makes you duck and look for cover is not. As data collection grows, your need for analytics will grow too. The key to data analytics is find ways to find the insights.
Keeping up with technology trends for your business may feel as futile as trying to figure out whether your 14 year old wants to be a VSCO girl or not. I mean, we literally can’t. But keeping up with technology for your financial advisory firm is more than watching trends. It’s about being able to position your firm best to manage risks and optimize advances.
Take the 5G tech. It was the major source of hub bub at the tech conferences in 2019, and its sure to drive technology growth and innovation in wireless. Aside from how that might elevate your TikTok viewing while waiting for the next train, 5G and advances in broadband are worth getting up to speed on. Here’s why: your clients will be better able to use their phones for all manner of things, including accessing retirement planning dashboards and trackers. Some tech companies even brag that they can make holograms on phone compatible graphics. The faster speed wireless will also drive everything else getting faster too, including a better WiFi experience, with faster download speeds and broader ranges of access. That too means your clients can monitor more of their investments from more places. The key takeaway for financial advisors is how 5G and WiFi6 will change how their clients think about websites and dashboards. Increasing your user experience on your website and on any associated retirement planning dashboards or sliders now can help you be well positioned for the 5G tornado that might be coming.
And it isn’t just the speed of transmission that is changing, but what gets transmitted. While big data was the top news of the last few years, the newest trend is analytics. This means the key is not just data collection, but data processing. There is more data than ever. There is a tipping point to which too much data becomes so much data and makes it all useless. A rush of data that helps you interpret trends and understand behavior is great. A fire hose of data that makes you duck and look for cover is not. As data collection grows, your need for analytics will grow too. The key to data analytics is find ways to find the insights. As analytics becomes a major push for your clients in their workplace, they may look to you for greater insights. A review of what data you collect and analyze now, and what might be most useful in the future can help you position your business well. A client survey of their questions and anticipated needs can also be helpful here as well
And while we are talking about data, we might as well talk about Blockchain again. Not just from the sense of enabling crypto currency transfers but as other industries now rely on Blockchain to provide the tech architecture to allow for digital transfers of all sorts of information. As more clients become familiar with Blockchain, they may ask whether they can implement Blockchain in their financial transactions. Conferring now with your attorney advisors about compliance with DOL and SEC regulations on client communications, transfer rules and other regulations can be helpful. Even more helpful could be for you to translate the attorney answers into a memo that clients can easily digest.
Finally, the last tech trend worth watching is the advancement of the Internet of Things. As your aromatherapy diffuser chats with Alexa, and your refrigerator orders more milk on Peapod, you may think of the IoT only as a communication tool. Instead, what the IoT may do in 2020 and beyond is to create a digital or business ecosystem. By connecting more than just household items, the IoT may expand how digital systems, including digital cloud systems, connect. And that means the IoT could provide more security breaches for your clients. Cybersecurity is always top of mind in investing, but with IoT too much connection might create a chink in the chainmail protecting your client’s security.
In addition to thinking through how your own office might benefit from upping its cybersecurity protection, you may want to consider how to address a cybercrash of a business you use. For example, for months a malware held Philadelphia’s electronic court filing system hostage. This system had a major impact on the foreclosure market, and that in turn could have had a negative impact on the real estate market and possibly REITs. One slip could upend another market like the financial one, so Malware and Cybersecurity may be critical in 2020.
Before leaping into the unknown, we recommend a thorough examination of your plan. Because we are experts in the field, we know the marketplace and know what your existing vendor is capable of offering. Through this examination, we can help you optimize the service you receive.
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