The 2022 Wealth Professional Awards (WPAs) saw Broadridge named Winner in the WealthTech Service Provider of the Year category. What were the reasons behind their success? WPTV recently spoke with Chief Product Officer, Donna Bristow to hear about Broadridge's progress – and what’s in store for the future.
Esme: [00:00:18] Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Wealth Professional TV special. My name's Esme Todd, and for this special episode, I'm pleased to welcome Donna Bristow, who's the chief product officer for Broadridge Wealth Management. Welcome, Donna.
Donna: [00:00:32] Thank you so much for having me.
Esme: [00:00:34] Broadridge is providing technology solutions to drive digital transformation. Donna, what do you at Broadridge offer wealth management firms and especially advisors with your single consolidated wealth management platform?
Donna: [00:00:51] The wealth management platform is a comprehensive wealth ecosystem that allows firms to grow their business and support their existing business with an optimal combination of wealth integrated components. Our components can be made up of Broadridge capabilities, third party, best in class partners, and also some of the firm proprietary capabilities that they want to continue using to support their business. Our application supports advisor productivity, so automating and digitizing the advisor experience. We focus on enhancing the client experience in better communications and collaborations between the investor, client and the advisor. And we've also focused on digitizing operations.
Esme: [00:01:40] Interesting. And how does it provide flexibility for the wealth management and especially advisors, businesses?
Donna: [00:01:48] Well, from our component strategy, a firm can pick and choose the components that they want to use, or they can leverage the entire platform. The platform from an advisor benefit perspective has an intuitive interface, allows the advisor to use insights and AI to help automate their book and support their clients. We have tools that provide an automated process from client onboarding or even from a CRM prospecting perspective all the way through to supporting a client, doing money transfers, digital communications, etc.. So it really automates that advisor capability to provide personalization and digitization to their investors. The ability for an advisor to support their client based on the digital channels that they appreciate and want to leverage, as well as sending out personalized information, whether it's regulatory, educational, or even about new products or some of the information that's going on in the industry. The platform really helps automate that capability for the advisor.
Esme: [00:02:58] Excellent. Thank you, Donna. And how does your platform modernize advisors, offices and practice ecosystems to fuel their client and business growth?
Donna: [00:03:07] What we focused on with the platform, whether it's the end to end platform or the individual components, is creating the collaboration between the advisor and the investor, but also the advisor and the Home Office and Operations Teams. So we've automated through notifications and really formulated processes to help the advisors support their client. They'll be able to automatically understand where different actions are if it's between the advisor and the Home Office, and also what kind of collaboration is required between the advisor and the investor. As I mentioned, the ability to provide personalized information specific to that investor to have a collaborative hybrid conversation is really important. The other big foundational piece of the platform is the integration capabilities. So as the advisor supports their business and looks to grow their business, the platform will enable an advisor or the firm to easily integrate new components and new capabilities using an integrated service layer. And the foundational technology allows them to add or remove capabilities to meet market needs, new instruments in the industry such as crypto or alternatives, and also continue on with automation using AI, insights, etc. easily to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
Esme: [00:04:35] And finally, Donna, we know we're in a business of constant change. So how does your platform allow both wealth management firms and advisors to unleash more innovation so that they can continue to transform their businesses for the future?
Donna: [00:04:49] I think one of the powerful pieces of our wealth platform is the ability that it can it can integrate not only best in class partners. So as new innovations, new partners, new technology becomes available in the industry, it can be integrated into the platform in the future. It also allows firms who still want to develop their own capabilities, especially in the advisor space. Many firms like to develop their own capability. That ability to integrate it into the platform embedded as part of the workflow is also available and easily supported in the future. And always, Broadridge will continue to innovate as well with all of our clients, and those capabilities will be made available across the platform, whether it's from an advisor perspective, the end investor or as we continue to digitize operations.
Esme: [00:05:39] Thank you. That just about wraps up this Wealth Professional TV special. Thank you, Donna, for sharing what Broadridge is offering advisors.
Donna: [00:05:48] My pleasure. Love to share the Broadridge story.
Esme: [00:05:51] For more information on Broadridge, you can visit broadridge.com. You can also check wealthprofessional.ca for the latest industry news and sign up for our daily newsletter if you haven't done so already. I'm Esme Todd and thank you for watching. Join us next time.
