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Industry Spotlight > Broker Dealers

Fidelity Adds Features to Advisor Tech Platform

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Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions has launched a new digital account onboarding capability among many other new features in its advisor technology platform known as Wealthscape.

The new onboarding experience allows advisors to digitally open individual brokerage accounts, fund the accounts through the transfer of assets and add features such as authorization to move assets. The integrated workflow will free up time for advisors to focus on financial planning and other client-focused activities, Fidelity says.

Their clients, in turn, will receive a concise snapshot of all the relevant data and disclosures needed for a transaction, reducing the number of pages they need to read by approximately 75%, according to Fidelity. It is a “complete departure from print-centric forms,” said Fidelity. Transactions are grouped and sequenced for easier investor access.

“Time is the most valuable commodity advisors have, and more than half of advisors we surveyed said they lose out on valuable client face time because of account opening paperwork, so we completely digitized the onboarding experience to give advisors, home offices and investors a more efficient way to handle many of their everyday tasks,” said Lisa Burns, head of platform technology, Fidelity Institutional, in a statement.

For firms that integrate their own technology with Weathscape, Fidelity is rolling out enhanced APIs for onboarding, account maintenance and funding, enabling firms to integrate the latest Wealthscape updates with their own solutions. They will be available through Fidelity’s Wealthscape Integration Xchange.

The new onboarding solution in Wealthscape will roll out to advisors over the course of the year and eventually replace Fidelity’s current onboarding tool.

Also included in the latest update to Fidelity’s Wealthscape platform are a new user interface that reduces the number of fields for account onboarding by 40%, easier search and retrieval of data for advisors with expanded prefill capabilities and the bundling of multiple transactions into a single email for client approvals.

Fidelity plans to add more features throughout the year such as prime brokerage and multi-transfer of asset options as well as further updates to its Wealthscape platform and mobile tools for advisors.

It is currently piloting new digital service features, including embedded digital learning, enhanced platform search, chat and virtual assistance capabilities, which are all expected to be deployed broadly in 2020. Its vision for the next state of Wealthscape can be viewed this week at FSI OneVoice.

Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions currently serves 4,000 firms.


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