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August 09, 2021 at 01:50 PM
What You Need to Know
- The firm is learning from innovators such as Peloton and Amazon to offer its advisors more digitally based services.
- It's got a pilot project in place for paraplanning, a process that can take 10 hours or more for advisors and clients.
- The firm’s New Ventures Lab, which opened in October, is responsible for "incubating" the ideas.
Burt White, LPL Financial’s chief investment officer, entertained advisors at the firm’s online conference last week as he worked out on an “LPLoton.” But his colleague Aneri Jambusaria, head of strategy, new ventures and analytics, says the broker-dealer takes innovators like Peloton very seriously.
In fact, Peloton’s out-of-the-box approach to exercise — like Amazon’s transformation of shopping experience — has prompted the broker-dealer to consider new ways to give advisors and their clients services such as paraplanning and comprehensive advice.
“While exercise machines have been around forever, they really figured out that customers want to be motivated to use them,” she said in a recent interview with ThinkAdvisor.
Consumers are busy and (due at least in part to the pandemic) want to be able to work out in new ways at home, “The advice industry is really no different — investors have more on their minds and more complex lives than ever before,” Jambusaria explained.
‘Innovation Agenda’
As a result, advisors are looking for more methods to meet clients’ growing demands and increasing comfort level with “a human professional wrapped in a digital experience,” she said. These are “customer friction points that create innovation opportunities [for LPL] … , which is really the context behind our innovation agenda.”
Thanks to this agenda, LPL can roll out more new programs through its Business Solutions unit, which is led by Matthew Enyedi, according to Jambusaria. These products and services allow advisors to spend less time on administrative and marketing tasks and more time working directly with clients.
The firm’s New Ventures Lab, which opened in October, is responsible for “incubating the ideas,” she added, and then other units of the independent broker-dealer — such as Business Solutions — run with them.
