How Raymond James Spends $1B a Year on Tech, With Advisors in Mind

In addition, Zolper noted in an interview with ThinkAdvisor, all Raymond James technology is designed in collaboration with advisors to provide a platform of integrated digital tools that support the advisor-client relationship. In other words, merely throwing more tools and applications at the advisor force is not how to deliver “winning technology.”

“We aren’t doing all this stuff in a vacuum,” Zolper said. “Everything we are doing to develop technology internally or bring in external service partners is done in direct partnership with our advisors to help them win back more of their time and make them more effective in the service of clients.”

Technology investment and commitment to cybersecurity are both key to Raymond James' broader growth strategy, Zolper said, and the annual budget reflects that.

Here are some additional highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

THINKADVISOR: Before we talk technology specifics, can you reflect on your recent appointment to the chief information officer role and the broader succession planning activities that have been unfolding at Raymond James?

ANDY ZOLPER: I’d be happy to. As I think you know, my own journey here at Raymond James started 13 years ago, and so I’ve had the chance to be a part of the long-term succession planning effort that we have seen come to a head in the last year or two as Paul Reilly retired from the CEO slot and Paul Shoukry took his place.

As part of the change, Vin Campagnoli moved from the chief information officer role to become the leader of technology and operations for Raymond James, and so I moved up into the CIO role back in October. Among other changes, we also saw Tash Elywn become president of the private client group.

It’s a lot of change at the top of the organization, but it has been done in a very careful way with lots of long-term planning in order to ensure that we weren’t going to have a sudden change in direction or provoke concern from the advisor force in terms of sticking to our proven strategies for supporting them and growing the business.

Personally, it’s an honor to be in this role, and my goal is to be a trusted source of expertise and support as we think about technology and how technology can help us achieve our business goals — to unearth new opportunities and solve problems. It’s a super exciting time within the organization.

I think it’s fair to say that Raymond James stands out in the wealth management space for the size and scope of its annual technology investment, which I believe is set for some $975 million for 2025. That’s up from $500 million from just three or four years ago. What is it like leading that investment effort on a daily basis?

It does sound like a lot of money, but we know that is the type of reinvestment and commitment it takes to stay ahead of the curve. The size of our technology budget makes it incredibly important to ensure it is really being spent on the right things and making sure that what we are investing in is directly going to benefit our advisors as they pursue opportunities.

Our internal tagline is that we are “developing technology from the mind of the advisor.” It’s not really a top-down thing, and I think the proof of that can be seen every year at our Elevate conference, which just took place earlier in May. The technology team and all of leadership is there on the ground doing what you could really consider to be a type of customer engagement. A big part of that is soliciting feedback about the technology platform and where there could be new tools put into place or better integration across what we have already delivered.

We base our decisions closely on advisor feedback and in an attempt to solve their specific pain points and use cases. Right now, what we hear so frequently from advisors is that they want tools and technology that can help them win back more time in the week to spend on deepening client relationships. They want help in delivering more personalized services and to spend more time with prospective clients in order to grow their business.

Can you tell us about the adoption of Zoom’s AI-based meeting summary tools? When it comes to new technology, how do you balance the decision to use an external service provider versus developing it internally?

It is definitely a balancing act, but what is interesting is that, from the advisors' perspective, the important thing is that the technology works well and is secure and reliable. They actually don’t care quite so much about whether it’s an internal tool we have built from scratch or something we have carefully vetted and brought in from the outside.

That’s what happened with the Zoom AI meeting summary tool. We considered a number of different options and concluded that Zoom’s solution was the best route forward, and we confirmed that with extensive advisor testing and feedback.

We’re thrilled to deliver this capability to our advisors. In testing, we’ve seen the solution saving advisors up to three or four hours each and every week while also improving the accuracy and functionality of information they are able to pull out of their client meetings.

I think this is going to be a huge home run for our advisors, especially as we begin to integrate the meeting outputs directly into our RJ CRM platform.

As a technology leader at Raymond James, how do you think about the long-term effort of balancing AI tools with the human-to-human relationships that are so important in wealth management?

It’s a great question. When I think about bringing AI tools to our people, our goal is to empower advisors to enrich their relationships with clients by making them more efficient and effective. We don’t think even for a moment about somehow disintermediating the advisor-client relationship through technology advancements.

Speaking from a personal standpoint, I don’t believe we’ll ever see AI be capable of replacing the advisor. Even when we get to a point where AI can handle tasks more autonomously, I personally believe the client will still want to be served by a human advisor who can validate everything and keep the emotional and goal-setting aspect of wealth management front and center.

Advisors will be more efficient in the future as they can essentially delegate more time-consuming tasks to an AI agent, but that will bring them closer to their clients, I believe, and not farther away.

AI may get better and better at making specific recommendations or suggestions about next steps, but it won’t be able to do what human advisors do when it comes to understanding their clients’ emotions and fulfilling their dreams for their wealth.

Finally, what’s the biggest challenge you face as chief information officer at a firm like Raymond James?

It’s really just the challenge of deciding which direction to go and ensuring that we remain highly disciplined in our deployment of resources. There’s so much opportunity, and we really want to have a very healthy respect for experimentation and testing out ideas.

I’ll circle back again to the Zoom AI launch. Behind the scenes, before any announcement like that, we undergo a rigorous process of testing with our advisors. We do this because we want to understand exactly what utilization could look like and how any new tool or technology will benefit the advisor and end clients.

And once any tool or service is put in place across the organization, that’s not the end of the story. We have a very focused and disciplined feedback loop, so we’re hearing from the advisors about what’s working well, what’s not working, where they are having challenges, etc. This is essentially and it will remain a key part of our strategy.

Pictured: Andy Zolper