Day 3 of the Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference opened up on a sunny Saturday in Dallas, which just also happened to be Valentine’s Day and the start to a three-day holiday weekend. As a result, the final day at T3 was predictably sparse. The remaining hard-core attendees braved being in the significant other Valentines’ doghouse to grab the final dose of advisor technology remaining on the T3 agenda.
Kicking off the morning’s general session was Barry Chapman, IT Director of Hanson McLain, a large RIA based in Northern California. Chapman walked the audience through how he had developed an integrated new account opening process through tight integrations with his document management system, Laserfiche.
Using connections to DocuSign for electronic signatures and automatically pulling data from his CRM into the forms filling LaserApp platform, Chapman was able to create a paperless account opening system that could work with any custodian. “We were able to take new account processing from 2 hours to 5 minutes with our integrations and automated workflows in Laserfiche,” said Chapman. “Additionally, we also saw document processing at the custodians drop from 5-10 days to 1-2 because we were preventing NIGOs (not in good order paperwork) from happening.”
Following the general session were a series of breakout panel discussions on a plethora of topics ranging from enterprise content management, to portfolio accounting software to what’s new in rebalancing software and more.
On the financial planning front, Finance Logix CEO Oleg Tishkevich led an entertaining and engaging breakout on the future of planning. With advancements in technology and health care, humans are living longer and longer lives, increasing the importance on planning for long retirements.
“There are scientists working today on using technology to transplant human brains into robots,” Tishkevich said. “This brings up the possibility of doing planning for immortals and making financial planners probably the most valuable of professionals,” he said, somewhat tongue in cheek. Regardless, the concept of super long life spans will have a dramatic impact on society as well as financial services, raising the importance of financial planning.
Wrapping up the conference were two breakout sessions on some of the more applicable aspects of technology for advisors. Deborah Fox, a veteran advisor and CEO of the Fox Financial Planning Network coached advisors on how to better adopt and implement technology, while Sam Attias of External IT showcased how his cloud desktop was critical for building defenses against cyber security attacks.
The final piece of news to come out of the 2015 T3 conference was the announcement of the retirement of David Drucker, Bruckensteain’s long time T3 partner. Drucker will head to a retirement of “doing other things” and received a well-deserved ovation from the remaining crowd.
To learn more about what went on at this year’s T3 conference, check out the many tweets on the #T32015 hashtag on Twitter.
Disclosure: Welsh has consulted with several of the companies mentioned in this article.
Timothy D. Welsh, CFP® is President and founder of Nexus Strategy, LLC, a leading consulting firm to the wealth management industry, and can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NexusStrategy.
