Our US correspondent, attending a major industry conference in Nevada, looks into the contents of the annual survey that examines the wealth management tech systems that score highly – and some not so much.

Redtail, Panoramix, TradePMR and Altruist emerged as big winners from the annual T3/Inside Information Advisor Survey, unveiled at the T3 tech conference for wealth managers in Las Vegas.

Redtail crushed the competition in the CRM program category, the software which has the greatest market penetration among financial advisors and was also ranked the most valuable.

Redtail scored a 45 per cent market share, more than three times that of Wealthbox, which has 14 per cent of the CRM market. AdvisorEngine CRM followed with 11 per cent, Envestnet/Tamarac with 6 per cent and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud with 4 per cent.

Although Panoramix has only slightly more than one per cent of the portfolio management software market, it nearly had a perfect satisfaction rating, almost 30 per cent higher than Orion Advisor Services and Pershing Albridge Wealth Reporting, which lead the category in market share.

Finding the right fit
T3 founder Joel Bruckenstein said Panoramix’s 9.5 satisfaction rating was the highest score ever in the critical category, which has the third largest market penetration of any software program category and is ranked second-most valuable by advisors.

Bruckenstein cited Panoramix as an example of a software program that may not be for every firm, but can be an exceptionally good fit for the right firm. “We shouldn’t just think about market share all the time,” Bruckenstein said.

The TradePMR custodial platform also has a low market share, trailing Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, SEI, Altruist, Interactive Brokers and Betterment. However, TradePMR scored a nine out of 10 satisfaction rating, which Bruckenstein called “really impressive.”

Schwab switchers
That performance bodes well for a must-have category where 20 per cent of the nearly 3,000 survey respondents affiliated with Schwab said they plan to either change or add a new custodial relationship in the next 18 months.

Altruist, the fast growing custodian that bought Shareholder Services Group last year, is best positioned to benefit from dissatisfaction with Schwab. Nearly 12 per cent of survey respondents now with Schwab said they are considering adding or switching to Altruist.

The need for cutting edge software was underscored by a new survey just released from fintech firm Advisor360, which found that nearly 92 per cent of advisors surveyed would switch firms because of a poor technology setup, and that 44 per cent already had.

New categories but no AI – yet
In the T3 survey, Moneyguide Pro, eMoney Pro and RightCapital led the financial software category with 33, 29 and 15 per cent market share, respectively. Covisium, FP Alpha and RightMoney all tallied over eight out of 10 satisfaction ratings.

Trading/rebalancing, investment analytics, document management and risk tolerance were rated the next most valuable software tools after CRM, portfolio management and financial planning.

Bruckenstein and survey co-author Bob Veres, publisher of Inside Information, added three new software categories to the software survey this year: portfolio design, healthcare planning and data warehouses.

Interestingly, artificial intelligence was conspicuously absent from the survey. AI adoption among advisory firms is “not quite there yet,” the report stated, although Bruckenstein and Veres say they expect “more wealthtech providers to unveil new AI features in their offerings.”

Noting that the survey included 40 different software programs, Bruckenstein and Veres said the array of choices would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. The expanding number of choices and categories means that advisory firms “are able to do more with their tech stack than ever before.”

The complete survey can be viewed here.