Fidelity Adds Multi-Account Opening, Multi-TOA (Transfer-of-Assets) Capabilities and More to its Fully Digital Onboarding Experience 

Fidelity Expands Digital Service Tools, Leveraging the Power of its Deep Investment in Advanced Technology Like Artificial Intelligence, and Enhances Wealthscape Investor℠ to Further Help Advisors Digitize Their Businesses

Fidelity Institutional℠ recently announced updates to the Wealthscape℠ advisor technology platform including enhancements to its fully digital onboarding capabilities, more digital service functionality and a refreshed Wealthscape Investor experience, helping advisors work more efficiently and deliver more value to investors. 

“Simplifying work for advisors and their clients has always been a priority for us, and it’s especially been a focus this year, beginning with the fully digital onboarding experience we launched in January and through to the platform enhancements we’re announcing today, as well as what’s on our roadmap for 2021,” said Lisa Burns, head of Platform Technology, Fidelity Institutional. “Advisors rapidly adopted digital tools at the start of the pandemic and continue to look for ways to save time and deliver on client expectations in today’s challenging environment. We’re helping them do that through our continued innovation.”

Digital Onboarding Experience Streamlines Workflow for Advisors and Their Clients

               In January 2020, Fidelity began rolling out a new, fully digital account onboarding experience to save advisors time and simplify account opening, which more than one-third of advisors indicate is the most cumbersome part of client interactions. The integrated workflow helps advisors work more efficiently so they can scale their business and spend more time adding greater value for clients through activities like financial planning. 

Highlights include: 

Since January, Fidelity added: 

• Multi-account opening, which allows advisors to easily open, fund and add features to more than one account, and supports up to five onboarding packages for an investor to digitally authorize. This makes it easy for advisors and investors to open and manage accounts at the family level, including seamlessly leveraging personal data across an individual’s accounts to eliminate rekeying of data and the ability to add account nicknames to personalize the experience so family members can easily collaborate. A new “shopping cart” style interface adds efficiency and flexibility by allowing advisors to include multiple accounts in the “cart” and quickly add, remove or modify the contents all at once.
• Multi-TOA (transfer-of-assets) capabilities streamline account funding; advisors can fund each account with up to three transfers from different sources during account opening.
• Support for trust and other registration types (including joint, transfer on death and retirement) and more features (including prime brokerage, beneficiary and standing instructions) further simplify workflows and enable advisors to seamlessly manage an even wider variety of investments and solutions for their clients.  

“We had a great response to our digital onboarding experience and worked with advisors to prioritize enhancements that further meet their needs, including support for the trust registration type through fully digital workflows – something we heard there was a real need for in the market,” added Burns.

Fidelity continues to expand the onboarding experience, with support for managed accounts, additional transaction types, and more integrations to provide streamlined end to end workflows. A new simplified investor signing experience further increases efficiency and minimizes investor errors during account opening, and will begin rolling out in early 2021. 

Expanded Digital Service Tools Help Advisors Work Smarter

Fidelity also continues to enhance the digital service tools it launched in May 2020 to help advisors optimize their efficiency so that they have more time to engage with their clients. 

• Wealthscape Virtual Assistant, which gives advisors quick answers to everyday questions about using the platform, has been expanded to support more than 100 topics, up from the 25 topics it supported at launch, and can now answer hundreds of questions related to taxes, trading, retirement, account maintenance, platform navigation and more, right within advisors’ existing workflows. The tool uses artificial intelligence to predict what information users might need based on their activity and quickly delivers meaningful answers within the platform. 
• Fidelity expanded its Smart Walkthrough integrated learning experiences, which lead advisors through the most effective ways to use the Wealthscape platform to drive digital adoption, ease transactional pain points and improve efficiency.

Wealthscape Investor℠ Enhancements Will Help Firms Deliver on Clients’ Digital Expectations

Fidelity is now piloting a refreshed Wealthscape Investor experience that makes it easier for investors to view their portfolios at a glance, quickly find the information they need, and engage with their advisors. The new experience delivers a simplified design and customer-focused workflow, leveraging design techniques that improve accessibility and reduce friction for all users. It will continue to be enhanced based on client and investor feedback. Updates now in pilot include:

• Simplified browser experience: Investors can quickly answer “how am I doing?” through improved portfolio visibility on the home page, including tiles highlighting recent transactions, asset allocation, top holdings, tax form timing and more. Design enhancements throughout the experience include more graphics and streamlined interfaces that mirror what investors are accustomed to in retail experiences, so that key information is more digestible and actionable. Wealthscape Investor can be customized with a firms’ branding for a cohesive experience throughout the client engagement journey.
• Redesigned mobile app: The Wealthscape Investor app already gives investors 24/7 access to brokerage account positions, balances and transaction history from their mobile device (including support for biometric authorization), and Fidelity is now piloting an updated app with easier navigation and a new look designed to meet the high expectations of today’s investors. The Wealthscape Investor app is available through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

For more information about Wealthscape, please visit go.fidelity.com/Wealthscape