Trends we should be watching are volatility and uncertainty. There are a lot of geopolitical issues and changes to the regulatory landscape, as well as inflation. Wealth advisors need to be able to adapt to all these issues and bring something to the table that clients can't find so readily anywhere else. Then there’s the challenge of technology -- AI is all over the place. Clients can get a robo-advisor that recommends options they should be considering. Wealth managers also need to deal with a multitude of new platforms, keep up with technology, and assess the channels they use to deliver advice to clients. Finally, there’s competition. There are so many sites out there, and information is at everybody's fingertips. How do wealth advisors prove their value to clients, when they're being told, "Hey, I can get this information elsewhere."

The thing I’m most excited about is that we’ve reimagined the user experience in a web-based application. Along the way we improved the workflows and implemented FDC3, the financial industry standard for sharing data between applications or widgets. As it stands now, a user can take an action in multiple widgets at one time. He doesn’t have to click on five or six different widgets. When he takes an action in one, the information is sent to the other widgets so it’s easy to jump to the information he needs. Here at ICE we can also integrate client data to make it accessible within our desktop application alongside available ICE data to help support a more comprehensive analysis and efficient workflows.

One way is through technology. There's a multitude of sites and mobile apps everywhere. It's so easy for the general population to get access to information that years ago was quartered to those who sought professional investment advice. Technology has made it more affordable with reduced transaction costs and improving efficiency. Companies are spending more on their technology to make it available to the general public. It’s data for all. Everybody can potentially see the same data and can make their own investment decisions without the high touch.

Push notifications and the mobile applications are right there all the time. Back in the day, it was stocks and options, but now it's stocks and options and ETFs and crypto and even investments in areas like private equity and mortgages. The list goes on and on.

The user experience is really important, so much so that we have a dedicated team for it. You could have all the data in the world served up to them, but if they don't understand the data and you don't make it easy for them to find, it's very easy to lose a user. From a wealth advisor standpoint, what you don't want to do is provide a desktop where your end client can't find the information she wants. It's easy to sign up on another site to see if the user experience is better. This is why we have spent time building out better visualization tools to make it easy to interpret large data sets.