Morgan Stanley's greener employees are teaching experienced financial advisers how to use its WealthDesk tools. It's a way to help out -and potentially rise through the ranks.
- Andy Saperstein, the head of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, described how the firm is training up its 15,000-plus financial advisers on digital tools.
- The firm has turned to a group of junior, "technology-savvy" wealth management staffers, who are not yet full-fledged advisers, to assist financial advisers in getting up to speed on new capabilities.
- The process underscores the fast-changing dynamics between advisers and technology.
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For Andy Saperstein, the head of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, convincing thousands of financial advisers to use new digital tools isn't difficult, or even the hardest part of meshing humans and machines.
The tricky part is getting them up to speed, and members of Morgan Stanley's wealth arm who are more digitally native are helping the process along.
"Change is hard, no matter what it is," Saperstein said at an industry conference in New York on Wednesday.
Morgan Stanley launched a new planning and advice platform - a type of one-stop-shop for advisers' books of business called WealthDesk - just last year.
Saperstein said the "stump speeches" he's delivered to Morgan Stanley's force of 15,000-plus US financial advisers have been well-received. But the training process is complex.
"That's really the trick, to understand that you have advisers that are very busy," he said. "They're working 24/7, and every night when they go to bed, they drop down exhausted. And they've been very successful, and part of what got them to be successful is likely not the fact that they're really technologists at heart."
Key to training up advisers is ensuring they knew precisely what kind of technology is available to them and how it would fit in with their everyday client interactions, Saperstein said.
The firm has turned to a group of junior, "technology savvy" wealth management staffers, who are not yet full-fledged advisers, to assist financial advisers in getting up to speed with new capabilities.
The process underscores the fast-changing dynamics between traditional financial advisers and the technology they increasingly have to embrace.
The team members assisting Morgan Stanley advisers are trained up on all new capabilities and entered into a kind of "accreditation," Saperstein said, where they "have to sit in front of advisers and prove to the advisers that they would be useful to a team in the branch."
In turn, this approach is a way to ease people into working with clients and existing adviser teams.
A generational gap for both advisers and clients has emerged industry-wise. The average financial adviser is 52 years old, according to market intelligence firm Cerulli Associates. Meanwhile, only around 10% of advisers are under 35, Cerulli estimates.
And millennials "appear less interested in previous generations about engaging an adviser," data and analytics provider Greenwich Associates said in a Wednesday report.
"Five years from now, seven years from now, they'll be fully functioning advisers with their own set of clients, but they won't have done it the old-fashioned way with cold-calling," Saperstein said. "They will have done it because they will have integrated into the team and served existing clients in a way they had never been served before."
He added that the process comes with the benefit of creating a younger and increasingly diverse adviser force.
In general, working to incorporate less experienced people into teams is something we've also heard about from Bank of America's Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.
Merrill sees a team environment with experienced advisers as one asset to help boost graduation rates for its adviser training program, Merrill Lynch Wealth Management President Andy Sieg told us in an October interview.
Some 80% of the advisers at Merrill are on teams, Sieg told us in that interview. That gives people access to a relatively wide customer base, he said, but means they also need to specialize skills quickly - in investment management, planning, or business development, for example.
Evolving wealth techMorgan Stanley has other tech upgrades on its radar.
We first reported last month that Morgan Stanley is looking to roll out a feature next year to help instantly analyze news and data about clients' portfolio holdings. That tool will be housed on the dashboard that the firm's financial advisers already have access to.
Some 79% of financial advisers Greenwich Associates recently interviewed said technology has had a "positive impact on their business."
Morgan Stanley named Saperstein head of wealth management earlier this year after he co-led the unit with Shelley O'Connor, now the chief executive of Morgan Stanley Private Bank and Morgan Stanley Bank, for three years.
Morgan Stanley, among the largest US wealth managers, reported $2.6 trillion in clients assets last month, marking a 3% rise from a year ago. The unit's adviser headcount dropped by 102 people compared with the same time last year. Total representatives fell to 15,553 from 15,655 one year ago.