Financial advisors have quickly adopted iPads and other tablets in order to provide the best customer service and experience, which in turn will maximize efficiency and profits. However, this rapid adoption of tablet-based devices has stretched IT organizations and introduced a number of challenges.
Let’s take a look at an example… In our not so hypothetical example, your financial advisor has shown up to meet you, replacing bulky laptops, binders and paperwork with a sleek tablet or the Apple iPad. In turn, your advisor may now be able to access corporate applications and data needed to present information, give a presentation or update CRM systems, all while meeting with you outside of the office.
In our example, the payback of enabling and supporting tablet usage by financial advisors is clear – increase the impact of one-on-one conversations and improve the effectiveness of customer interactions. However, these paybacks do not come without some challenges, which IT and Legal/Compliance departments are likely losing sleep over.
With the rise in ownership of mobile and non-traditional devices by employees, traditional approaches cannot deal with the productivity, security and compatibility challenges which tablets and iPads have introduced. Historically, these challenges might have been overcome by binding Financial Advisors to their office-based desktops and making them print off client presentations. That IT-centric approach placed the needs of IT above the needs to service clients and Advisors with the best and most efficient experience. We are now seeing that paradigm shift.
Enabling a Financial Advisor to give a presentations on an iPad or other tablet has a certain “wow” factor and slightly increases productivity. But the bigger challenge and productivity gain comes from enabling the Advisor with access to a self-service portal for enterprise applications. This would provide the Advisor with on-demand access to the applications and business services, such as CRM systems and up-to-date client reporting and performance systems, that they need.
Due to strict compliance regulations and fiduciary obligations, Financial Advisors, IT, Legal/Compliance are each concerned with security because of the increased potential of theft and security breach. If the employee owns the tablet, this raises further concerns about how IT can control the storage and use of client-sensitive data and the potential for hijacking data on employee-owned devices.
To deal effectively with security concerns requires applying different security profiles and policies that systematically prohibit saving data to local devices while also making sure that any enterprise data being transmitted across Wi-Fi and 3G network interfaces is fully encrypted.
The type of operating systems across tablets varies from Apple’s iOS to Google’s Android. This causes many of the traditional enterprise-based applications, which run on a Windows operating system, to be incompatible with a tablet. So the IT organization is faced with the challenge of either buying or building a custom-app that gives Financial Advisors access to the applications they need while working remotely on a tablet or iPad. Instead, what is needed is an effective way for the Financial Advisor to get access to critical applications all while doing it without significantly increasing costs or adding in a whole new set of apps that IT has to support and maintain.
A band-aid based solution, involving IT custom built apps, writing new employee security/data retention policies, changing firewall settings and using “cloud based” storage or file sharing solutions (such as Amazon’s aws, Dropbox, or SpiderOak) is likely being employed by some investment managers and Financial Advisors.
The alternative is to look for an end-to-end solution that utilizes as much of the existing enterprise technology already in place. Through my research, it appears that Citrix has an end-to-end solution which is worth considering. This solution combines “Citrix xendesktop” to create virtual desktops with a tablet app called “Citrix Receiver”. It is worth watching this 4-part video series from Citrix entitled “Enabling iPads within your organization” to get a sense of the solution.
What other challenges have you seen Financial Advisors encounter?
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