BooST Your Practice with Themes from Chalice 2020

There’s power in community. When a group of like-minded people come together for a common purpose, the potential is limitless.

Chalice (the community) brings advisors together. CEO Keith Gregg kicked things off with some engaging and entertaining examples that highlighted the power of community. With the rise and mass-adoption of the internet, people find themselves looking to reconnect with the world around them. Advisors working solo or in a small shop can feel the solitude after a short amount of time. This community can help.

Chalice (the event) focused on creating valuable conversations and topics of discussion to engage this audience. Some themes were present in other conferences we’ve attended over the last year, but not all of them. Here are the top four themes from Chalice Boost that will shape our industry over the next few years.

Blockchain isn’t just a fad

Dr. Richard Swart is an alternative finance scholar, helping the government and other organizations make sense of events that could have a drastic economic impact. The invention of blockchain is one of those “events”. The entire industry will be moving to a blockchain system whether we like it or not. As a leger system that allows your transactions to be permanently recorded, it will help massively with security in the age of cybercrime.

With Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase being the two largest patent holders for blockchain technology, look for this trend to reshape our industry over the next five years.

Adoption and integration

The adoption of technology has been an ongoing challenge for many advisors. Eric Clarke (CEO of Orion Advisor Services), Dusty Russell (Relationship Manager at Redtail Technology), and Steve Zuschin (EVP at LifeYield) discussed this in-depth on their panel.

Advisors who have their way of doing things can find the influx of new technology overwhelming. But the current market landscape could be the catalyst that sparks adoption. If advisors continue to reject technology, their chances of landing new clients during the inevitable wealth shift will decrease dramatically. The competition will be leveraging technology to build clients’ trust.

For FinTech companies, integrations are crucial. The more integrated our technology is, the faster advisors can adopt new solutions. This graphic from Michael Kitces proves how important integrations truly are to the FinTech landscape.

Advisors have too many choices when building out their tech stack, so they inevitably end up with a variety of different tools:

• Financial planning: eMoney, MoneyGuide Pro
• CRM: Redtail, Wealthbox
• Trading: Orion
• Custodian: Fidelity, Schwab, TD, LPL, Pershing
• Rebalancing: AdvisorPeak, iRebal, Tamarac, Black Diamond, Orion
• Tax optimization: LifeYield
• Performance reporting: Orion, Tamarac, Black Diamond
• Analytics: Morningstar
• Risk: Riskalyze

FinTech solutions and platforms need to integrate to create the best possible experience for advisors to service their clients. When all their tools talk to each other and intuitively share data, advisors can move faster and make more accurate decisions, resulting in increased revenue for their firm and happier clients overall.

The chart above gives many normal people a headache. I get it. As a marketer, I have 7,000+ solutions to choose from to do my job.

But through collaboration between industry favorites (some named above), rest assured, this pack is thinning. Integrations are getting more advanced and the top players will be those that can make API connectivity available to the baseline technologies that have mastered advisor workflows.

At LifeYield, we recently did this with our partner AdvisorPeak. You can read more about it here.

Digital currencies are for real

The buzz about Bitcoin has come, and gone, and come back again. Now, everyone seems to have a different opinion about crypto. But who’s right?

As with any investment, there are reasons to purchase one type of crypto vs. another. We’ll stay away from giving any recommendations, but when you dive deeper, there are a lot of different angles to consider beyond a normal currency play.

Whether you plan on adding crypto to your shortlist of investment solutions, it’s becoming mainstream, and your clients are curious. Be prepared to have conversations with your clients about crypto. If you don’t, someone else will.

Growth through M&A

Mergers and acquisitions are also shifting the wealth management landscape. According to Dan Kreuter, Chairman at Gladstone Group, 40% of advisors are expected to retire over the next decade. Nearly half of all wealth management clients will have a different advisor in ten years. That’s an insane stat!

Keith Gregg recommends continuing to update your Succession Link profile whether you’re acquiring or retiring. You need an updated and compelling profile to even be considered for either side of this transaction.

Taking this into account, M&A will be a prominent financial services theme of the 2020s.