For any financial planner, providing custom advice should be at the center any relationship. This requires constant mining of client information, product data, industry regulations, and interpreting data to deliver accurate investment advice for clients. We think that the best way to support the delivery of this is through an automated digital experience.

Aside from transparency and the ease of use that is brought about by enabling clients to access their portfolio digitally, another beneficial aspect is that it can help us as financial professionals to curb panic when the market swings. Because investors are prone to loss aversion, they tend to make decisions that can hurt their long-term financial success. Therefore, our role is to provide that human touch alongside investing and client delivery, and we think they all go hand-in-hand to help clients to psychologically weather market volatility.

This balance between investment excellence, client delivery, and the human touch is critical to an investor’s success. Investors are often been plagued by having to pick one or two of these, which obviously leads to sub-optimal outcomes. But technology has changed the game, lowering costs and creating efficiencies throughout portfolio construction, product improvement, and client access. We think that automating routine tasks and digitizing much of the client relationship means that we can focus more on circumstantial life events or concerns about market fluctuations. But more often than not, we find that by giving clients more access and transparency, our conversations are mainly focused on new circumstances in their financial situation.

Still, investing tends to be an emotional experience, which is why we think that an automated digital experience is so critical. To use a football analogy, we think this does a lot of the blocking and tackling. What’s left is a cleaner sightline for the quarterback to throw the ball down the field to the wide receiver. In the case of your investments, the clear sightline is the ability for you to monitor your account.

With the blocking and tackling accounting much of a client’s day-to-day needs, the human touch grows more important as the client’s financial lives become more complex. SWS Partners offers the integration of investments with broader planning services such as estate, trust, tax and succession. In this model, we don’t think that investors should have to choose between investment excellence, client delivery, and the human touch.

We seek to deliver all three.