BTConnect

It’s a difficult time for the wealth management industry as it copes with changing regulations and a rising spate of customer mistrust, especially from the retiring community of America. On one hand, we have the seniors with limited or no capacity to absorb losses and make financial recovery when investment choices go awry. On the other, there’s the younger generation whose financial security post retirement is already at risk because of reduced incomes, unemployment, shifting ownership of retirement planning with defined contribution accounts for employees, and possible reductions in Medicaid and Social Security benefits down the road.

The biggest challenge for financial advisors today is to generate reliable income for individuals after their retirement. Since retirement planning is the core offering of many wealth management firms, its lowered performance has also dented the revenue and reputation of financial advisors and portfolio managers.

According to of the Financial Professional Outlook (FPO) survey, advisors find they are ill equipped to manage investment and saving for retirement goals which is a different cup of tea from regular financial planning. They feel the investment industry does not provide the right tools to set a standard for how this should be done.

While software solutions have made some headway in reducing the manual load of advisors and improving workflow efficiencies, they are at a nascent stage. Mobility is a logical progression given its growing popularity and potential in arming advisors with real time data and reports, order placement tools, business intelligence, and client engagement features anytime, anywhere.

Mobility solutions that focus on customer service

To survive the tumultuous financial climate, wealth management firms must break out of traditional moulds and offer innovative and diversified fund management services to customers. Financial advisors that strategize around customer focus and embrace latest technology such as mobility and social media can add real value to their services and generate profit for their customers and themselves.

Enabling financial advisors’ education
Over 98% of FPO survey respondents build expertise by consulting a range of resources including online material and books (68%), industry peers (52%), fund companies (49%) and accredited courses (45%). Mobile learning and training solutions can help advisors learn continuously, anytime, anywhere from multiple sources and via multiple content formats.

Increasing customer understanding of finance instruments
The FPO survey reveals that only 54% of clients have realistic expectations from their financial plans. Advisors can generate adhoc visual simulations of investment outcomes over a period on their laptops or tablets to drive customer understanding. Graphics and charts are better understood by clients versus complex financial details and calculations.

Winning customers’ faith
Technology solutions rule out inaccuracies created by manual calculations and predictions. With mobile solutions, advisors can quickly access client’s accounts, compare assets with liabilities, view industry reports, stock market analysis and equity research to take informed decisions on the best investment choices for individuals. Decisions can be taken collaboratively during client interactions and executed instantly.

Ensuring standards of care
Regulatory standardization and compliance can be built into enterprise software solutions such that advisors are alerted if they miss out on a checkpoint that could end up hurting the customer or the firm.

Reinforcing consumer focus
Enterprise mobility solutions enhance the quality of client interactions. Advisors can demonstrate a portfolio’s progress towards goals, build clients’ understanding of outcome oriented finance plans, and be more accessible. Greater transparency and informedness instills confidence and trust in clients.

The wealth management industry is poised at a critical juncture amidst new industry trends, rising customer demands for transparency, need for a model to deliver specialization and scale for competitive advantage, and creating potential financial rewards. Technology will play a key element in this strategy with mobility set to grab center stage owing to its ubiquity, ease of use and huge technological potential.

Meaningful Usage 2 (MU2) core objectives require healthcare practitioners, health centers and care givers to demonstrate meaningful use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) that enable workflow efficiencies, healthcare accessibility and consequently better patient care. This can only be achieved through the effective interoperability of otherwise siloed systems within hospitals as well as laboratories and care givers such as specialized homes and dieticians.

The success of end-to-end mobility solutions as well as modular apps like mobile patient registration apps, e-prescriptions and point of care mobility solutions rides on the seamless flow of information across hospital functions.

While traditional Hospital Information Systems (HIS) take care of the medical, administrative, legal and financial aspect of hospital management, newer systems include EHR systems and support the transition from Patient Health Records (PHRs) to EHRs. This is critical as EHR interoperability across healthcare organizations is a core objective of the MU2 program.

HIS & EHR

Assume that a patient arrives at a hospital with an integrated HIS and EHR system. She walks into the reception and uses a mobile patient registration form that to register herself. Her record is created immediately on the HIS. Based on a short description of her current symptoms, she is sent relevant educational videos and slides on her mobile device while she waits for the doctor. Meanwhile, her details have been sent to the doctor from the front desk.

The doctor views the patient’s details on a mobile dashboard. If the hospital is part of a Health Information Exchange (HIE) network, the doctor can access the patient’s complete EHR in a jiffy. The EHR will give him the patient’s medical history, helping him make an accurate diagnosis, prescribe medicines that are safe, and outline a treatment process. During the patient doctor encounter, the doctor enters his observations into the mobile dashboard in real time. This is automatically updated into the hospital’s PHR or the EHR.

Relevant details are also sent to the pharmacist through an eprescription model, the front desk is sent information for the billing process to be initiated. The front desk also sets a follow up appointment for the patient after checking the doctor’s calendar available via an app. All this would be impossible without backend integration of systems.

Interoperability also helps In-patients by enabling accurate bedside care, post-operative and post-release care. With real time updates to patient records, nurses, lab technicians and other caregivers can perform their delegated tasks on time without manual mistakes.

Integrated systems enable seamless information exchange and mobility creates further operational efficiencies that help hospitals to reduce costs, track and optimize resources, deliver quality care, and promote public health.

EHR Interoperability

Efforts are on to augment the benefits of system integration with EHR interoperability. That is, facilitating patient data exchange between multiple EHRs. There are major technical, infrastructural and political challenges here but some initial steps have been taken such as:

• The development of point-to-point communication protocols for EHRs certified for MU2 to ensure secure transmission of encrypted patient data between providers. The protocol is being developed by the Direct Project, a consortium of EHR vendors, medical organizations, government agencies, and consultants and is expected to become available in 2014.
• The formation of an independent, not-for-profit organization CommonWell Health Alliance that will support universal, trusted access to healthcare data through seamless interoperability on a national level.

Undoubtedly, interoperability is a critical success factor for the achievement of MU2 objectives. Whether we talk about hospital systems or EHR, without interoperability, quality patient care for every American will remain a far off goal.

Research shows that mobile device usage is rising steadily among financial advisors. Financial advisors want mobile solutions that allow them to manage all their business functions from a portable device that helps them stay productive on the go. Many mobile applications have come up for wealth management planners to manage a range of tasks such as interacting with clients, researching investments, checking accounts and executing trade.

According to a MyPrivateBanking Research report “Mobile Apps for Financial Advisors and Wealth Managers,” mobile solutions are the “most industry-disruptive but potentially most rewarding developments in the wealth management sector.” Advisors are leveraging mobility solutions to enrich client interactions, augment advisory processes and build long-term relationships with customers.

Financial advisors go mobile

According to a survey by ByAllAccounts, a company that provides Data Aggregation services for financial companies, tablets are being used by nearly 42% of the financial advisor community, with iPad being the favorite gadget. Respondents cite the following reasons for adopting mobility:

• staying connected with the office (83.7%)
• increased productivity (67.4%)
• easy and quick access to relevant education material (59.8%)
• moving towards paperless processes (52.2.%)
• enhanced client meetings (50%)
• improved responsiveness and availability to clients (48.9%)

Existing mobile solutions for financial advisors offer many useful features such as access to real time information, client account activities, leading edge reports, portfolio data, performance views, visual statistics, and even the ability to generate ad hoc reports during client meetings. Not only are the mobile tools making client interactions more meaningful, advisors are able to manage more with less, anytime, anywhere.

A number of wealth management firms are going the smart way and equipping their advisors with tablets. They are also implementing security measures such as remote device wipe in case a device is lost or stolen, data encryption and cloud storage where data is not stored on the device at all. Clearly, customer data security and regulatory compliance are paramount to every finance firm’s mobile strategy. You don’t want to hit headlines for the wrong reasons.

What financial advisors want

Financial advisors are looking at mobility solutions as partners in business. Some desirable features of top financial planning mobile applications include:

• ease of use and simple design
• CRM access
• portfolio management
• quick access to real time updates of market events and stock
• ability to process dynamic data (what-if analysis, predictive modelling)
• proactive notifications on client account activities
• secure client communication tools
• multi-format content support (video, PDF, presentation, etc.)
• performance reporting
• trading order placement (domestic stock, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund)
• ad hoc reporting
• visual data reports
• alerts and inquiry abilities (about holdings)
• customizability and personalization
• data security

Mobility solutions help financial advisors stay ahead, stay connected and stay prepared for their clients. They offer win-win opportunities for wealth managers and their customers.