Fidelity Institutional announced Thursday a new raft of enhancements to its Wealthscape advisor technology platform.
Among these are several improvements to the firm’s digital onboarding capabilities first announced in January, expanded digital services and an updated design for the end-investor’s Wealthscape interface.
Three highly requested improvements to onboarding delivered in this batch are the ability to open multiple accounts within a single process, multi-TOA support (meaning an advisor can fund each new account from up to three transfers from different sources—rather than have to do them individually) and end-to-end digital support for trust accounts (among other types).
“We have tons of registration types and continue to add them into the digital workflow process and one that had been an area of friction and much requested was the trust account and making it available digitally,” said Lisa Burns, head of platform technology at Fidelity Institutional. A new, simplified investor e-signature experience will be rolled out in early 2021.
Improvements have also been made to several digital service tools that the firm announced back in May. When first launched, the Wealthscape Virtual Assistant chatbot could assist advisors with just 25 different topics, and that has since been expanded to 100. This now includes answers to hundreds of questions advisors might have, from taxes to trading, account maintenance and platform navigation.
“We have found that this really helps advisors to self-service across the entire Wealthscape platform,” Burns said. Fidelity continues to employ machine learning provider Hyperscience for some aspects of this, which allows for more efficient analysis and processing of incoming inquiries.
More improvements have also been made to Smart Walkthrough integrated learning experiences. When new features have been added, advisors are notified when they log in if a Walkthrough has been made available and prompts them to take a look. These interactive digital tours lead advisors through the most effective ways to use the new feature.
“We had advisors telling us they did not want to leave where they were in the platform to open up text help somewhere else, so embedding digital training within the tools and walking them through that process right there has helped to drive adoption,” Burns said.
“Probably more importantly, it allows us to show them the best way to optimize the experience and drive down NIGO (not in good order) rates,” she said.
And finally, Fidelity is in the midst of a pilot on a simplified browser experience for the end-investor interface of Wealthscape. Clients can now immediately see a snapshot of all their accounts immediately on the home screen upon logging in. The redesign also brings forward additional information that clients might previously have had to dig or search for, such as tax form timing. This includes both brokerage and RIA clients. There is also more ability for investors to customize their views.
“From a design perspective having a tile format that is intuitive and can be re-organized by the client, we think will be well-received,” Burns said, adding the team worked on issues of accessibility too, making sure for example that charts can be understood by those who are color blind and that content for the visually impaired who rely on digital readers has descriptive tags that identifies elements on the screen. Also, refreshed versions of Fidelity’s Wealthscape mobile apps (available for both the Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems) are being piloted.
