3 Ways The Digital Age Will Change Financial Planning In The Next 10 Years

The inspiration for today's blog post is some work I've been doing in recent months trying to vision how financial planning will change in the coming decade. One of my greatest inspirations has been some of the concepts put forth by author Thomas Friedman in his book "The World Is Flat" - which looked at how business and the world has changed through the late 1990s and the early 2000s as a part of the digital revolution. The basic theme of Friedman's book is that with the rise of technology and connectivity, globalization is making the world "flat" and breaking down the impact of distance and geography. No longer are India and China on "the other side of the Earth" from the US; they're all part of one flat, interconnected world of globalized business. As a result, companies do business with those they wish to do business with for any host of reasons... but geography itself, once a dominating factor, is less and less relevant.

In the financial planning context, the idea that a digital world could render geography largely irrelevant dramatically alters the landscape. For example...

- Practice Management. The trend towards operational outsourcing in financial planning as a practice management tool is just beginning. As financial services moves paperless, key forms are completed via e-signature, and the availability of email, video, and messaging tools continues to improve, there will be less and less need for staff members to be physically present in the office. This will be especially valuable to the smaller start-up firm, which will have the capability to pay for exactly the amount of staff time needed to support key functions. This represents a dramatic improvement over the typical growth process for young firms, which swing from feast to famine as business owners get overwhelmed in operational minutiae, until they hire a staff member, who actually has more time than is needed to fill the job until the firm grows further; in the meantime, the firm owner feels pressure to go out and grow the firm more aggressively to make up for the significant personal pay cut that occurred as a result of hiring. In the digital world, dedicated staffing firms lease time as needed to firms that need it, who pay for exactly what they utilize, no more and no less... and get a highly experienced and trained staff member to boot. Even larger planning firms will have the opportunity to be more selective about which staff functions they fulfill with personnel hiring, versus outsourcing, allowing them to focus more on the core value proposition they deliver, and a value proposition for mega firms may be the virtual staff they make available for new advisors to utilize.

- Marketing and Business Development. In a digital world, planners do not have to rely solely on face-to-face interaction and in-person relationships to develop business. Instead, planners can make their skills and capabilities known, and help clients find them. In fact, from the reverse perspective, clients will no longer search for a planner who is best in their geographic area; instead, they will search for the planner who is best able to meet their individual needs. As a result, growing a practice shifts from outbound marketing to inbound marketing, a process especially conducive to niche marketing approaches that excel in a world where anyone in the country who happens to fit the planner's niche can become a client. On the plus side, this will allow many planner firms to grow more effectively, because the firms are no longer constrained to clients in their geographic area. On the minus side, firms that are not especially well differentiated and rely primarily on the fact that they are the "only" firm in the area that does what they do will struggle greatly.

- Delivery of Financial Planning. We are still on just the cusp of truly integrating technology into the delivery of financial planning services. In the future, the client's financial plan will live in the cloud; it will be accessible from anywhere, on any number of different devices; it will update continuously from currently available information, automatically sending alerts to the client and the planner when a problem arises or a goal is achieved. Planning will simultaneously become more automated and more proactive. In turn, this will shift the role of the planner to be more than ever the navigator to help the client chart a course to succeed in the financial journey, and the wise counselor who provides advice and wisdom along the way; the planner will simultaneously become both more consultative and interactive, yet with fewer in-person meetings and less physically present (as face-to-face is simply less necessary in a world where communication happens by so many different means). The face-to-face meeting will not vanish completely, but it will simply become one possible communication modality, rather than the anchor of the planning experience.

These trends will continue slowly but steadily in the coming years, accelerating in the second half of the decade as an increasing portion of Generation Y enters the workforce, begins to save and invest, starts a family, and becomes a consumer of financial services - not to mention the newest employees of most planning firms! - while at the same time baby boomers increasingly depart the financial services industry and transition their businesses to Generation X leadership that is far more inclined and willing to integrate technology. When the digital revolution intersects with the generational transition, the pace of change in financial planning will rapidly accelerate.

So what do you think? Have you seen any of these trends already underway in your practice or with your client interactions? Are you outsourcing more than you used to? Has the digital world changed your marketing? Are any parts of your financial planning delivery becoming more virtual? Are you prepared for these changes in your planning firm?