For Advisors, 'More Modern Way of Working' Means Far Less Paperwork

Savvy manages more than $1 billion in client assets, and one of the firm’s strengths, Malhotra maintains, involves advisors’ daily discussions with the tech team.

Malhotra, who holds nine patents, several in cloud-based shared content, notes that proprietary AI software helps the firm’s advisors by “sitting in” on phone conversations with clients, summarizing them, choosing action items and executing some of them.

Here are highlights of the conversation:

THINKADVISOR: What’s the crux of “the modern wealth management experience,” as you call it?

RITIK MALHOTRA: The ability to give advisors all the tools they need to be much more effective in reducing the amount of time they spend on paperwork — back-office work, calling the custodians and partners — and instead, giving them automation and software that handles all of that for them.

This is really the more modern way of working where advisors get to spend much more time with their clients.

Exactly how has Savvy Wealth made it a more modern experience for clients?

We’ve made a lot of software technology, such as a visual dashboard, where they get to see a real-time update of their balance sheet, access to their files, historical notes.

That makes it easier for them to access their advisor for any of the personalized, customized advice they need for their portfolios.

What does all that have to do with advisors’ business growth?

We seem to have really cracked the nut in automating and removing a lot of the burdens that hold advisors back. This is how we measure success.

If the advisor has more time, they can grow their business faster and spend more time with clients.

What one or two things can your software do that competing firms’ software doesn’t provide?

Here are a couple: The first is a fully digital onboarding flow for clients. Advisors can give them a direct link [to a digital form] they’re able to easily fill out in less than five minutes.

[Our automation] then takes the information and opens accounts, moves assets. It puts all of what used to be a stack of papers that advisors would have to take to their clients and then back to the custodian in an automatic digital flow.

That’s been very impactful. It helps advisors make a great first impression with new clients, and transitioning [existing] clients is much easier.

You want [onboarding] to be a delightful, less painful experience.

What’s another example of your tech that other firms don’t have?

Because we built a fully integrated system from the ground up, we have our own CRM [customer relationship management] system.

That has allowed us to build a lot of artificial intelligence-type capabilities in it.

Such as?

Being able to have our AI sit with the advisor on calls with their clients [“listening” to them] and taking notes, if the client agrees.

What does your AI do next?

Transcribe the call, if the advisor and client consent; summarize it; help the advisor extract action items — things needed to be done — and then get started on executing some of those workflows on behalf of the advisor.

What’s by far the biggest advantage to the advisor?

It allows them to focus on the client, and it reduces the amount of time they need to spend constructing a summary of the notes, sending it to the client, thinking about what the action items are.

What else?

From a compliance perspective, this is a really impactful tool because advisors don’t need to go back and tell compliance: “This is what we talked about. This was the outcome.” All that is automatically available.

So it’s like the paperless office people were talking about but didn’t know how to get to until advanced tech made it possible. Right?

You got it! Yes, exactly.

What’s another reason for your firm’s success?

We’re working closely with our advisors about technology on a daily basis. We have our tech team speak with the advisors constantly.

But we also have a formal structure where our entire team and the technology team get together every two weeks to go through a full feedback session discussing what’s working really well and what isn’t.

What makes that a big plus?

When you have that direct, unfiltered feedback, the technology team cares [even more] about making everything great.

They’re able to take that feedback and translate it into better software with more improvements. And they do it really quickly. It allows us to build this very personalized, customized modern technology for the advisor at a fast pace.

In the great scheme of things, how does AI benefit the client?

The top benefit is that it allows the advisor to spend less time on those paperwork tasks because AI can do all that and [therefore] allows them to spend more time focusing on the clients.

Clients want personalized attention.

What’s a direct benefit for the client?

Time-saving. For example, with the onboarding flow of new accounts, the client’s turnaround time is much faster because the AI is able to figure out how to take all this information, automatically fill out what used to be paperwork, [integrate it], and send it off to the end customer.

This is providing a more premium, personalized service, but it’s [still] centered around the advisor.

Our AI tech solutions are saving advisors as much as 11-19 hours per week in back-end tasks.

Also, AI has supported marketing and client segmentation tasks, allowing advisors to recruit potential clients more intentionally and efficiently.

Does all the automation do away with administrative assistants’ jobs?

No. We’ve made tech for an internal client servicing and administrative team. This actually makes these [employees] a lot more efficient with their time.

They’re able to complete and deliver tasks on a faster, more accurate basis for clients and advisors.

We want to enable people to do their jobs better and faster, not replace them.