Walkner Condon Financial Advisors: The Pros and Cons of Consolidating a Tech Stack
Clint Walkner Technology Walkner Condon Financial Advisors: The Pros and Cons of Consolidating a Tech Stack Clint Walkner of $560 million AUM Walkner Condon likes the scope of an all-in-one platform but at times misses some best-of-breed tools. CRM/Portfolio/Reporting: Advyzon We started with Redtail as a CRM, and later migrated to Wealthbox. We used them for several years in conjunction with Blueleaf. Wealthbox was the CRM built for the API era. They were able to bring in Blueleaf and other feeds and tie them in all together. Wealthbox did a great job of integrating everything. And, I do have to say, I miss some of their CRM tools.
About 2 1/2 years ago, we started to consolidate our portfolio management and CRM tech stack together. That’s when we started to use Advyzon. When you go to an all-in-one, like Advyzon, it’s more of a closed system, like Apple. That's why we chose them. We wanted something that was an all-in-one product. We didn't have to buy everything off the shelf and integrate everything together. We wanted one that was more cohesive. However, you get fewer APIs, in many cases. It doesn't quite integrate as well.
For financial planning, we mostly use RightCapital, though one of our advisors uses MoneyGuidePro. As a more closed system, Advyzon is more focused in the way that they tie in via API. But, your usual suspects, your big financial planning companies, for example, do tend to integrate. It happened to work with our practice.
Phone System: Google VoiceWe used to use RingCentral, which was terrible. We wanted something that was compliant with text archiving. So, we switched to Google Voice about six or seven years ago. That was a good selection. We dabbled in MyRepChat for a bit, but went back to Google Voice, because they do a good job of archiving text message exchanges and voicemails through Google Vault.
Virtual Meetings: ZoomZoom Phone isn't quite as compliant from an archiving perspective. We're not switching to them yet.
We use Zoom for all our virtual meetings. We’ve started to dabble in their artificial intelligence tools, which have been great for meeting summaries. It will also record the call. If we ever want to go back and refer to something, we can certainly do that.
There's also an additional step, Zoom Revenue Accelerator, that breaks down the videos into bite-sized pieces. It does a wonderful job, in a concise way, of taking all our talking points and splitting them into different subsections and headers. Ninety percent of what is put into the meeting notes is accurate and usable. The other 10%, we clean up slightly and add additional notes. That's really our notetaking now. A process that would take you 20 to 30 minutes has been honed down so it now might take you five. This is saving our advisors a ton of time. They love it.
We are looking at more AI tools where we can. What I'd like to be able to do is record an in-person meeting and be able to generate meeting notes off that. I'm hoping that AI also, through Google Voice, can generate the same type of meeting summaries that we're able to get through Zoom.
Scheduling: TypeformWe use Typeform as a window in scheduling prospective client appointments and which advisor somebody might want to select. We want to know where our leads and clients come from and with which advisor they would be best matched. The client can find advisors to speak with who have the right expertise. It's doing a, “What if?” scenario decision tree for all the clients. We're able to take that data and identify how our marketing funnels are working. We're able to design it so it gets to the right advisor with the least number of clicks. Then we can get back to the prospects quickly. It's winnowing those prospects down and being intentional about our offerings. For example, if you were in France and you wanted to schedule with one of our ex-pat advisors, you can easily get to one of our experts that that does that. We don’t want you to schedule with a domestic advisor instead accidentally.
As told to reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what's in your wealthstack? Contact Rob Burgess at [email protected].
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Originally posted on: https://www.wealthmanagement.com/technology/walkner-condon-financial-advisors-pros-and-cons-consolidating-tech-stack