As businesses look for new and innovative ways to provide a more personable customer experience that takes into account the modern digital lifestyle, business-to-consumer e-portals with innovative functions like co-browsing and screen-sharing have come to the fore for customer service. Looking to capitalize on the trend, Fidelity Investments is looking to refresh its online approach with the acquisition of eMoney Advisor.
eMoney is a Philadelphia-area financial software company with a new platform, dubbed emX, which is essentially a digital dashboard for wealth management for financial advisors and their clients. It has a range of financial planning options, and resources to improve collaboration and efficiency, including mobile access, an intuitive dashboard, a live financial feed with client alerts and system updates, the ability to aggregate account data from thousands of institutions, screen sharing and presentation mode for collaboration without third-party software, a Social Security analyzer, and so on. emX also features a host of new, deep-data integrations with technology providers like Morningstar, Orion, Redtail, HiddenLevers, Albridge Wealth Advisors, Envestnet, Brinker Capital and SEI.
It’s an advisor-side app, but analysts say that Fidelity can use the technology to update its aging Web presence, especially when it comes to the client portal, aggregation, screen-sharing and co-browsing.
“This acquisition is primarily about the account aggregation and the portals, at least initially,” wrote Joel Bruckenstein, a financial software tracker, in a blog. “It enables Fidelity, on both the advisor side of the business and the retail side, should they so choose, to rapidly bring to market a platform capable of competing with the B2C robo-platforms.”
In the financial services world, the rise of so-called “robo-advisors” and “robo-platforms” has dominated the digital channel. It’s a term that refers to automated platforms with hooks to live advisors that can manage uncomplicated and beginner financial portfolios as a fraction of the cost (and without the investment thresholds) of traditional financial advisors. The latter usually take a 1 percent to 2 percent annual fee and require initial asset investment to be at least $500,000. So robo-advisors have become the wealth management tool for the rest of us, and have been a big differentiator for smaller companies looking to compete with big Wall Street firms.
In the case of the eMoney buy, Fidelity plans to combine emX with its existing digital assets, such as StreetScape and WealthCentral, to form the basis of Fidelity’s next-generation advisor platform and consumer platform.
“For the past six to nine months we’ve been talking to our [registered investment advisor] clients about the features they want to see in the next generation of technology,” Fidelity’s Erica Birke told Retirement Income Journal. “They said they want data aggregation, they want to be able to look at all of a household’s assets and liabilities in one place, which makes their job easier.”
Edited by Alisen Downey