Wealth management technology provider Envestnet will lay out its future vision of the industry during its fifth annual Advisor Summit conference in Chicago.
The summit, which begins Wednesday, is expected to draw 2,000 attendees, including an estimated 1,300 financial advisors.
Jay Hummel, Envestnet’s managing director of Strategic Initiatives and Thought Leadership, said the overall theme of the three-day conference is “the essential advisor.”
The company will reveal strategic investments and a product roadmap that focus on helping advisors remain relevant in an era of robo advisors and the fiduciary rule, he said.
Envestnet Tamarac, the division behind the Advisor Xi platform, on Tuesday announced an update to its CRM application. The new version of Advisor CRM is compatible with Windows 10 and Microsoft Office 2016, and includes improved search and navigation, support for the latest Apple and Android operating systems and a new “recently used” list that lets advisors pin their most frequently used items for easier access.
Stuart DePina, Envestnet Tamarac’s group president, will provide further detail on the new CRM as well as other recent developments to Advisor Xi, including capabilities for percentage ownership accounts, updates to the client portal and new integrations with CAIS and Pershing’s NetX360 technology platform.
Thursday will focus on technology, highlighted by a keynote presentation by Envestnet Yodlee CEO Anil Arora.
“We get so many questions around Yodlee. Anil’s keynote is really going to be laying out that proposition of … why we acquired Yodlee and why it’s going to impact investments and client experience in the future,” Hummel said.
Totum Wealth, a client engagement and analytics firm, will demonstrate how it uses the Yodlee aggregation technology to produce a more holistic assessment of client risk.
“With the Envestnet Yodlee integration, the experience of importing a portfolio and illustrating its risk trade-offs are streamlined for our customers,” Totum CEO and co-founder Min Zhang said in a statement.
Hummel said two other major themes of the conference will be helping advisors put financial planning at the center of their value proposition and incorporating data analytics into management decisions and dashboards. Envestnet also plans to unveil Open ENV, which will “create an open architecture ecosystem which extends Envestnet’s core technology and processing engine.”
The Advisor Summit will also feature keynotes from Jean Chatzky, the financial editor from The Today Show; Urban Meyer, Ohio State University’s head football coach; Walter Isaacson, the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute; and Greg Valliere, the chief global strategist at Horizon Investments.
This is the last year the Advisor Summit takes place in Envestnet’s hometown of Chicago. To accommodate the growing number of attendees, Envestnet will move its annual conference to Dallas next year.
