Fidelity Institutional today announced updates to the Wealthscape advisor technology platform including enhancements to its fully digital onboarding capabilities, more digital service functionality and a refreshed Wealthscape Investor experience, helping advisors work more efficiently and deliver more value to investors.
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“Simplifying work for advisors and their clients has always been a priority for us, and it’s especially been a focus this year, beginning with the fully digital onboarding experience we launched in January and through to the platform enhancements we’re announcing today, as well as what’s on our roadmap for 2021,” said Lisa Burns, head of Platform Technology, Fidelity Institutional. “Advisors rapidly adopted digital tools at the start of the pandemic and continue to look for ways to save time and deliver on client expectations in today’s challenging environment. We’re helping them do that through our continued innovation.”
Digital Onboarding Experience Streamlines Workflow for Advisors and Their Clients
In January 2020, Fidelity began rolling out a new, fully digital account onboarding experience to save advisors time and simplify account opening, which more than one-third of advisors indicate is the most cumbersome part of client interactions.i The integrated workflow helps advisors work more efficiently so they can scale their business and spend more time adding greater value for clients through activities like financial planning.
Highlights include:
- Advisors can initiate account opening 44% faster
- Advisors can complete transactions in 42% fewer clicks
- Advisors’ clients review around 75% fewer pages to open an account
- Advisors’ clients review nearly 20% less information throughout onboarding process
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Since January, Fidelity added:
- Multi-account opening, which allows advisors to easily open, fund and add features to more than one account, and supports up to five onboarding packages for an investor to digitally authorize. This makes it easy for advisors and investors to open and manage accounts at the family level, including seamlessly leveraging personal data across an individual’s accounts to eliminate rekeying of data and the ability to add account nicknames to personalize the experience so family members can easily collaborate. A new “shopping cart” style interface adds efficiency and flexibility by allowing advisors to include multiple accounts in the “cart” and quickly add, remove or modify the contents all at once.
- Multi-TOA (transfer-of-assets) capabilities streamline account funding; advisors can fund each account with up to three transfers from different sources during account opening.
- Support for trust and other registration types (including joint, transfer on death and retirement) and more features (including prime brokerage, beneficiary and standing instructions) further simplify workflows and enable advisors to seamlessly manage an even wider variety of investments and solutions for their clients.
“We had a great response to our digital onboarding experience and worked with advisors to prioritize enhancements that further meet their needs, including support for the trust registration type through fully digital workflows – something we heard there was a real need for in the market,” added Burns.
Fidelity continues to expand the onboarding experience, with support for managed accounts, additional transaction types, and more integrations to provide streamlined end to end workflows. A new simplified investor signing experience further increases efficiency and minimizes investor errors during account opening, and will begin rolling out in early 2021.
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