TL;DR – Milemarker exists to make good on the promises of fintech – streamlined processes with fully integrated data. It’s possible and you can have it.

I’m not the kind of person who enjoys antique stores. I don’t get excited about the idea of finding a treasure in the middle of an estate sale. I’ve never been one to get romantic about the past. I’m the opposite – the early adopter, the one who stands in line to get the latest and greatest. I’m the guy who tunes in for product updates. Even if you don’t get as excited as I do about those events, eventually, your experience with technology is forced to evolve. Even if you’d rather use a local drive instead of the cloud, you can’t escape the march forward. That is, unless you’re using financial technology, in which case, you may find yourself sitting on a dusty settee in the back of a dimly lit store.

Take a look around.

First of all, let me be clear. Nobody set out to make financial services technology suck.  It wasn’t a goal that CEOs or even compliance teams set out to achieve. There weren’t in-office slogans like, “Mediocrity: Our Goal for 2017.” This industry is filled with some of the smartest people I’ve ever known – good people who want to move advisor and client experiences beyond usable. They want their customer experience to be remarkable.

But here we are, using antiquated systems that are dependent on each other to hobble along. Our clients use four different logins to see the full picture of their portfolio. Our teams open seventeen tabs to onboard a client. We struggle to respond fast enough to clients’ needs for cash. Daily work contains far too many loading icons – not the kind of spinning gears you thought you’d see when you first imagined your tech stack.

How did our industry get here?

Many of the technology companies that you work with today are diligently working on solving huge, pressing issues, but ultimately, they have to focus on their own bottom line and stay committed to their core use cases. Your specific needs can’t show up on their roadmap until enough other people have the same issue, and in the meantime you have to solve it yourself.

Your IT team is tasked with figuring out problems they never signed up to tackle. They’re fantastic at hardware and keeping your systems up and running. They triage issues based on the guidelines you provide, but staying focused on client/team experience isn’t their strong suit. Understanding the business needs and anticipating them is what you do, not IT. They buy and implement new systems with great new features but this just adds to the mess – more logins for clients, and more screens for advisors.

Wealth management will keep increasing in complexity for advisors and clients until we solve the integration problem, and, at its heart, the integration problem, is a data problem. 

I’ve spent my entire career peering under the hood of technologies and watching advisors deal with the frustration of integrations that ultimately create messier data.

So how do we fix it? 

You need a partner to help you solve your core data integration problems – to help you warehouse all your information with rules that keep your data accurate and healthy. You need to be free to use the systems you and your advisors want without losing the ability to understand what’s happening in the overall business. If there’s one thing we all know about the future, it’s that innovation is going to keep coming. 

Are you ready?

I am, but I wouldn’t be on my own. Starting off as a fintech marketing and product designer, I needed an extremely technical expert to come alongside me, to pair my front end knowledge with the backend solutions that our industry needs. I looked outside the industry to find the right data team to bring our industry to a completely different level. 

How do we get there?

It’s exactly what fintech needs – to understand the condition of your data and bring it to unity, to find the flaws and purify, to build systems and processes that leverage the totality of your data, amplifying your message and business as a whole. Led by Lee Tengum, the technical team at Milemarker is experienced, driven and proven. I couldn’t be more excited about solving the most pressing issues you are facing with them.

If this is the year for you to finally get out of the antique store and step into unified, modern, technology, we’re here to walk with you into the future. I’m excited to be back focusing on what advisors need to run their businesses with excellence and I’m excited to introduce our development team to you.

I hope your new year is off to a prosperous and healthy start. All the best.