Who owns your data and how are they using it? Other industries are already struggling to answer these questions, but technology executives at the MarketCounsel Summit said Wednesday that this will become an area of focus in financial services next year.
“The top three things for 2016 are data ownership, data ownership, data ownership,” said Lowell Putnam, co-founder and CEO of the data aggregation software company Quovo.
While most providers will agree that clients own the data around their bank balance, it goes much further, Putnam said. “Does an advisor own all the data they have through LPL. And if they decide to leave LPL, can they take that with them and do you help them?”
The question on the horizon, especially in the independent space not governed by the Broker Protocol, will be: ‘how do I take my core assets and data and keep them with me wherever I go for the next six parts of my career?’
But LPL Financial Chief Information Officer Victor Fetter said equally important is the answer to the question: what are you going to do with it? Fetter added that LPL does give departing advisors their data, but then what?
It’s not just about owning the data, it’s about making it so that it is digestible for the end user. Firms can give advisors access to a data feed on their clients, but if they don’t have tools, or even better an entire system in place, to comb through the data, it’s useless.
"The technology you use impresses no one, the experiences and insights you create using it is everything," Fetter said.
