The report Transforming Your Business Through Advisor Technologies from Celent Research draws some interesting conclusions about where companies will invest with regards to technology in the near future.

Some of the investments will be dictated by either the spreading of growing use of technology to manage all aspects of financial advice, while others will happen because of the high demand from clients. The former will call for big investments in areas like

e-signature, financial planning, wealth management platforms, automated investing, client onboarding technology, and online collaboration tools.

The latter will command efforts towards a better user experience for online services, and omnichannel strategies that allow the clients to choose either their preferred communication channels and the devices and platforms used to stay connected.

The overlooked rise of the robo-advisor

One of the interesting aspects of the report is the emergence of digital advice and especially of robo-advisor as a way for companies to offer a more complete and compelling service. The future is likely to see strong competition on this factor, as a good robo-advisory complementary offering may make a company stand out and diversify itself on the market.

One of the most interesting aspect of the report, though, is the mixed responses of the companies to the emergence of robo-advisors. Look at the results on the Celent report:

How have firms reacted to the emergence of digital advice?
Source: Celent, Survey 2015

The great majority of firms considers robo-advisory a good reason to multiply the efforts to upgrade and innovate internally with regards to advisory technology, and that was expectable. About every other firm plans to use robo-advisory in addition to their traditional offering.

But, one company out of ten thinks that robo-advisory has no impact whatsoever on its future technology investments. And, rather surprisingly, no company sees robo-advisory as a potential threat to their business.

Such a level of confidence is surely interesting, given the growing focus of the market and every significant player on this trend. We think that, in the medium term, we will see higher values for the last two columns of the figure.