Registered investment adviser (“RIA”) firms have steadily increased their adoption of digital tools has steadily increased over the years and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this shift.
The pandemic introduced several challenges that advisors and their clients had to navigate together, namely, market volatility and the difficulty of not meeting in-person. Advisors were challenged to seek ways to interact online with clients efficiently and securely. In this blog post, we discuss the benefits of implementing digital client portals at your RIA firm. Client portals can not only the enhance client experience but are also help an RIA firm firm to become more operationally efficient and secure.
Clients can feel disconnected to their advisor when they are not able to meet in-person which is why advisors have been adapting and providing their clients with secure client portals. Online client portals offer a way for advisors to share insights and real-time portfolio performance or financial plans. Additionally, many client portals are able to integrate with an advisor’s portfolio management and financial planning workflows to help create internal operating efficiency and deliver a more holistic reporting experience to clients.
What role does a client portal play in enhancing client satisfaction?
Client portals create two-way collaboration between advisors and clients starting with information exchange, document management, and providing updates to clients on how their investments are performing towards their goals. Providing clients with insights regularly and allowing them to go over the details at their own pace will help them feel more involved in the investment process and increase transparency and trust with their advisors.
By enabling clients with 24/7 access to their investment portfolio, advisors save a significant amount of time by no longer fielding basic account inquiries. Advisors are able to focus more on improving outcomes rather than time-consuming back and forth email or phone calls.
Client portals can also act as a centralized place for information enabling customers to browse through customized content available at log in. Examples for that might be current industry news, financial trends, or simply better explaining methodology the client may not have been familiar with before.
When searching for a client portal that is right for you or your RIA firm consider which features are the most important to you, your advisory firm, and how they will provide the most value. Are you looking for quick access to reports on account holding details and investment goal summaries? What other software are you already using that should integrate with the client portal? A robust client portal should include capabilities for secure messaging, digital signatures, and a document vault.
RIA firms that adopt digital client portals can save time, improve efficiency, and dramatically enhance the client experience.