Only 13% of financial advisors feel in complete control of their time. Back-office tasks are one of the main culprits of this problem, consuming financial advisors’ workdays and drawing away their energy from growing client relationships or building new ones. But technology can help advisors manage those administrative tasks and devote themselves to client-facing services.
By having your back-office technology tool manage certain time-consuming tasks, you’ll easily earn back the money you invested. Consider: If you think your time is worth $250 per hour (if not more!) and your back-office tool saves you 15 minutes each day on even one activity while costing $600/month, you’ve earned over 100% ROI.
Read on to discover the fastest ways to get a high ROI from your back-office technology.
Delegate Trivial Tasks
Thirty-one percent of financial advisors consider administrative tasks a huge obstacle to their productivity. Think of the mundane, repetitive tasks that you complete day after day and year after year. Those are tasks that back-office technology can manage for you.
Among other items, these simple tasks and more can be either managed better with technological innovations:
- Asset allocation
- Customer relationship management
- Data entry
- ETF or mutual fund selection
- Fee comparison and calculation / invoicing
- File organization
- Investment research
- Marketing and social media
- Performance tracking
- Client report delivery
- Portfolio mapping
- Rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting
While your back-office technology tackles these tasks, you can focus on the big-picture items that require your full attention, like cultivating relationships with your clients and reaching out to new prospects. Technology can manage many things, but some projects need a human touch.
Implement Automated Reporting
As the CFP Board’s Chief Executive Officer Kevin R. Keller recently said, “Clients expect and deserve a human-powered, digitally-enabled solution to their financial needs.” One of the best ways to provide this integrated solution is by capitalizing on the automated reporting that many back-office technology solutions provide.
Some back-office technologies even offer you the option of configuring reports, empowering you to choose the information you would like each report to display depending on the client narrative you focus on for your firm. These reports automatically update, and can be either viewed on a webpage or printed out to accompany an in-person meeting.
You and your client can review these results together regularly, and you can send the reports to their emails on a predefined schedule if that is their preferred mode of receipt. With access to these personalized, accurate, and reliable reports, you can provide more expedient, consistent, and insightful service to your clients, earning more leverage in your interactions and improving your overall business operations.
Work With Your Technology Provider
While exploring your back-office technology and learning best practices on your own is going to get you far, there is a faster way to earn the most ROI on your investment: work with the original experts.
You should regularly read your provider’s newsletters, websites, or other communications, searching for news about any updates or successful case studies. Asking for tips will help, too; your technology provider has an extensive understanding of the tool they created. They know best practices discovered after years of working with their creation and also those that their customers have revealed as well.
Finally, keep an eye peeled for integration releases; good providers will work with modern APIs to plug in their tool with your other favorite tools and streamline your operations. The best will even listen to your suggestions, creating new solutions they didn’t offer before.
Back-office technology is an investment, but getting ROI from your new tool takes only a few adjustments—and the control over your time you earn in the process is well worth it.
