Artificial intelligence is reshaping how financial advisors manage their practices. From automating compliance tasks to streamlining meeting notes, technology is handling the routine faster than ever. But as the day-to-day workload shifts, one thing remains unchanged: clients choose and stay with their advisors based on trust, judgment and the quality of the relationship, not on how efficiently their paperwork gets processed.
In this session sponsored by Maximizer, Lewis Dyson, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Luis Martinez, Training and Development Manager, walk advisors through the real impact of AI adoption on the advisory practice. The session covers how to evaluate new tools and understand what technology can and cannot do, so advisors can direct their time toward what matters most.
Key takeaways:
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[00:00] David Kitai: Hello and welcome to this WP webinar brought to us by Maximizer. Clients don’t want AI. They want a human with time and knowledge. What AI can’t do. My name is David Kitai. I’m the senior editor at Wealth Professional.
Just a quick note of housekeeping. There will be a Q&A session at the end of our webinar today. So I would encourage each of you to add your questions into the Q&A box at the bottoms of your screens as they occur to you. I’ll remind you again as we get closer to the session.
[00:35] Today’s topic is a vital one as AI continues to change our industry. AI is creating huge time savings. It’s automating routine work. It’s speeding once lengthy compliance processes, and it’s making research and analysis a more seamless experience.
Today’s webinar, however, focuses on what AI cannot do. We’re going to be outlining where advisors can spend their newly won time to have the greatest positive impact on their clients’ lives.
[01:00] To carry this conversation, we are very lucky to be joined by Lewis Dyson, Senior Product Manager at Maximizer, and Luis Martinez, Training and Development Manager at Maximizer. Gentlemen, take it away.
[01:09] Lewis Dyson: Thanks, David. I’m Lewis Dyson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Maximizer. We build a CRM for financial advisors, which means the two of us have a front row seat to the topic we’re going to get into today, which is how the relationship between advisors and technology is changing.
[01:33] We see a lot, where it’s helping, where it’s not. Full disclosure, I’m not an advisor, so I’m not here to tell anyone how to do that job. But what I can do is share what I’m hearing from a lot of practices and see what some of the ones that are getting this right seem to have in common. Luis.
[01:54] Luis Martinez: Good day. My name is Luis Martinez. I’m the training and development manager at Maximizer CRM. I have 13 years of experience in training advisory teams in CRM usage.
Throughout these years, I’ve spoken to several teams trying to understand their processes and to guide them and provide a solution to improve the delivery of services to their clients.
[02:20] I’ve trained many financial advisory teams, and today I’m going to share some of the things I have learned over the years. We’re going to show you what we will be covering today. Here are our topics. We are going to be discussing all five of them, and so we’ll go ahead and get started on the first one.
[02:42] Lewis Dyson: Thank you, Luis. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago what advisors talk to me about the most, it was usually features. Can the product do this? Does it connect to that?
In the past year or eighteen months, I’d say the conversation is starting to change. Advisors aren’t really asking about technology. They’re more telling me about their day.
[03:08] So here’s a typical day that I hear about. You might have 45 minutes before a meeting where you’re prepping for that meeting. You’re opening the CRM, your custodian portals, your notes from last quarter, email threads, and you’re stitching it all together by hand.
Then you actually have the meeting, which is the good part, the fun part that we all enjoy.
[03:38] Then for another half an hour after that meeting, it’s writing up the meeting, updating the notes, updating a file, logging the call so compliance has what it needs.
For the rest of the day, you might have a KYC that’s coming due. You might get a form sent back because a box wasn’t ticked. You have reminders to chase documents. Then you have the next meeting.
[04:08] When you think about it, very little of that was actually delivering advice. That’s work that goes on in the background that clients never see. It doesn’t earn a single dollar of trust, but it takes up most of the day.
What is changing is that a lot of this work is starting to move.
[04:32] What we’re seeing now with AI and these new tools is that meeting notes can write themselves and land in the client file. A client summary might be prepared for you before you even open your calendar. A KYC review can launch a new workflow by itself.
That’s already happening in practices across Canada.
[05:00] One thing I keep coming back to is an advisor I spoke to this year. He had just inherited a book of about sixty households from a retiring colleague. He’d never met any of them and had to go into retention calls with all of these clients.
Two, three, or four years ago, that would have meant going through every file manually, which could have taken weeks.
[05:31] Instead, he had a summary of each household’s history pulled together for him by AI before each call. How they came to the firm, what they worried about, whether they had a child starting university.
He retained one hundred percent of those clients.
[05:55] What was really cool was that when I asked him what the technology did, he said it didn’t keep the clients for him. It just let him walk into those conversations already knowing who they were.
That’s an example of how technology is starting to take over the routine work that advisors have.
[06:23] Nobody I talk to is really asking for financial advice to be automated. Nobody wants a machine to have a difficult call with a client.
What advisors are asking for is for this technology to get the paperwork out from between them and the people that they serve.
[06:48] The most successful advisors don’t really do much admin. Their time is much more valuable in front of a client. Until recently that took a team of people around you to achieve, but technology is now catching up to the point where this is becoming possible.
Luis, I’m sure you see this at the training level every day.
[07:24] Luis Martinez: Yes, and in my training sessions I have come across many ways advisory teams are using technology to help them achieve the level of client service that they desire.
There are things that are still needed as far as human interaction.
[07:50] Nowadays we have a lot of tools that can help distribute tasks among teams, allow you to capture KYC information, take notes, create transcripts of your calls, and generate summaries with next steps.
All those things are helpful and save time.
[08:15] Technology is helping us become more efficient by automating repetitive tasks such as filling out forms. But there are many things that still fall under the advisor.
An advisor can talk about risk tolerance, check whether it matches what the client previously said, and ask whether the time horizon is realistic.
[08:46] Those are the things that make a KYC meaningful and not just a form with checkboxes ticked off.
Technology can’t replace the face-to-face interaction. Explaining the importance of having a trusted contact person, watching for signs of diminished capacity or financial exploitation. This takes judgment in a live conversation.
[09:10] Explaining fees and how they’re paid, or conflicts of interest in a way that the client understands. Those interactions all benefit from a human touch. Clients are going to receive the documentation either way, but it’s the advisor who makes sure that they understood.
