Balancing tech investments with adviser enablement

Wealth management firms know their commercial capabilities are underdeveloped, and most have identified roughly half of the solution.

Leaders know technology can deliver exceptional returns; even the more conservative estimates show AI will likely have an outsized impact on front-office efficiency and effectiveness.

Yet recent surveys show nearly three-quarters of firms are prioritising investments in tech over other areas of development.¹ This puts them at risk of a very costly miscalibration.

Tech ROI can be strong, but is hard to predict; history suggests it is at best a mixed bag. And while the right tools can facilitate better client service and commercial behaviour, it is the people in your front office who make the real difference.

The transformation loop: why wealth management tech investments often fail

Most WealthTech is sold on cost efficiency and time savings. Yet only about one in five advisory firms actually buys technology for those reasons. And according to a recent Kitces report, that minority is 40% less productive than peers who buy tech to deepen client relationships and improve service.²

This might seem backwards. You would expect firms optimising for speed and cost to be the most productive, not the least. Yet the finding supports a wider pattern within wealth management, which is that technology investments are hard to predict and frequently backfire.

Nearly a decade ago, McKinsey showed that over 70% of digital transformation efforts fail.³ And despite radical improvements to the available tools and the pandemic-driven acceleration of digital adoption, most firms still struggle to make these initiatives succeed. Research shows that just 27% of wealth management firms today are “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their current technology.⁴

That dissatisfaction leads to a cycle of investment, frustration, and replacement. More than a third (34%) of firms plan to upgrade existing systems over the next one to three years, while 24% intend to implement new financial planning tools.⁵

We call this the transformation loop. One tech investment cycle created the well-documented “frankenstack”; the current one seeks to consolidate it. The next could see firms adding more tools to the mix, especially given the volume of new solutions on the market.

The number of WealthTech vendors has nearly tripled since 2018.⁶ By the time tech stacks are revamped, a new generation of solutions will likely promise to fix whatever disappointing ROI the last round of investments produced.

This is not meant to be cynical; we simply want to draw leaders’ attention to the dynamic.

Wealth management is an industry dogged by its historically slow digital adoption and anxieties about its status in the wake of AI. Many leaders feel their reputations and potentially even their jobs depend on showing that they are tech-forward.

But the only way to make this round of investments different is to identify what actually fuels failed digital transformations and poor tech ROI.

Why adviser development is essential for tech ROI

The transformation loop is often fueled by a belief that better technology will fix commercial problems. Across studies from Deloitte,⁷ WealthManagement.com,⁸ and others, leaders cite front-office and customer experience improvements as the chief reason for technology investments.⁹

This conflicts with the evidence of how tools are implemented, as 70% of advisers still say they aren’t given sufficient time to learn and implement new tools.¹⁰ But more importantly, it puts the cart before the horse:

Better CRM doesn’t inherently lead to stronger prospecting or client experience if firms don’t help advisers develop the skills required to deliver those outcomes.
More capacity doesn’t lead to increased organic growth if advisers don’t know which activities to prioritise or which capabilities generate those results.
Better client-facing platforms won’t drive organic growth if advisers don’t build the capabilities to nurture and maintain those relationships.

This is the central structural problem that keeps firms in the transformation loop. Budget is invested in tools that are designed to support advisers, rather than direct adviser enablement or development. It treats culture and behaviour as products of tech adoption. In reality, it’s the other way around.

There is clear evidence AI will give advisers far more “golden time.” Activities relating to client meetings traditionally take roughly 10% of the average adviser’s time, but note-taking, writing, and meeting-prep tools can automate most of those tasks today.¹¹ Similar results are clear across multiple other areas, with KPMG projecting that advisers could reduce time spent on manual prospecting by up to 50%.¹²

This led Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick to declare that AI would save advisers 10-15 hours per week.¹³ But that raises the question: how can we be confident advisers will properly capitalise on that extra calendar space?

Tech investments are crucial for wealth management firms to remain competitive. But that investment must be supplemented with an equal investment in the people who use the tech.

How capability-based development supports commercial performance

Adviser development is held back by a lack of clarity around two questions: what should be developed and in whom?

It’s possible some firms don’t invest in adviser enablement alongside tech because it feels inefficient. Leaders want to increase their ROI; offering every adviser the same development program, when you know their potential and needs vary dramatically, feels counterproductive.

SBR’s Capability Model fixes that problem. Not only does it pinpoint and improve exactly what’s required to drive the commercial outcomes you want, but it quantifies that ROI prior to any development spend.

We achieve that through four principles:

1. Measure potential, not capability

Most assessments photograph where an adviser is today, which tells you who is already performing but not who could. We measure potential against specific commercial activities, prospecting, referral generation, client expansion, so the picture is diagnostic rather than a ranking.

That distinction matters because current performance is often a product of an adviser’s book or tenure, not their underlying ability. Measuring potential surfaces the people who can move a particular facet of organic growth, and stops firms overlooking advisers whose capability hasn’t yet shown up in their numbers.

2. Invest selectively, not broadly

Uniform development spreads budget evenly and returns unevenly, because advisers don’t start from the same place or respond the same way. The highest returns sit in the Invisible Middle: the solid performers with genuine, unrealised potential who rarely get targeted attention because the firm’s focus defaults to its top producers and its strugglers.

Concentrating resources there, rather than across everyone, is what changes the economics. In practice, targeting development this way can roughly double its ROI compared with a one-size-fits-all program.

3. Tie every intervention to an outcome

Development that isn’t anchored to a commercial result tends to dissipate, which is why so much training is forgotten within weeks. We run targeted capability sprints against the behaviors correlated with referral generation, net new business, or retention, each with a defined outcome and a way to measure it, then embed the behavior so gains compound rather than fade.

This also forces a clarity most firms lack: in SBR’s data, 68% of leaders and advisers don’t agree on what good growth behavior even looks like. You cannot develop reliably toward a target the team hasn’t defined.

4. Quantify the impact before you spend

The principle that makes the other three accountable is measuring return, ideally before the investment is made. In one SBR engagement, advisers meeting four or more capability benchmarks correlated with £8.8M in AUM inflows, 105% of target, against £3.9M, or 62%, for those meeting three or fewer.

Those are one client’s figures and the numbers vary widely between firms, but the mechanism holds: because capabilities are weighted against each firm’s own performance data, the output reflects what drives growth in that specific business, not a competency list imported from another industry.

Curious how much untapped AUM your advisers could be sitting on?

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