The 2021 T3/Inside Information Software Survey report is now available. This report is a product of months of data analysis by Bob Veres of Inside Information and Joel Bruckenstein of T3. With more than 5,100 respondents, this is by far the most statistically viable report on this important topic in the profession.

Perhaps the most consistent aspect of the survey over the years is that the advisor community, overall, ranks CRM as the most valuable piece of their software suite, followed by financial planning, followed by portfolio management.

This year, more than half of the respondents ranked CRM at the top of their software hierarchy, while a quarter of them chose financial planning as the soft- ware they would least likely to do without.  

Another 15.46% selected portfolio management as their most important software, meaning that CRM, planning and portfolio management are the clear leaders as far as the tech that most advisory firms rely on.

The remaining 8% of advisors who found other tech to be more valuable included 3.71% of our survey respondents who believe that investment analytics is their most valuable element in the company toolbox—a number which seems to go down each year. 2.27% of our survey respondents believe that risk tolerance is their most important software, and 1.99% voted for document management as the key tool in their tech stack. See page 51 of the report.

The 52-page report provides all the market share and user rating information for more than 200 different software programs and services in 32 different categories—basically the entire landscape of tech products and services in the financial services ecosystem.  

Veres and Bruckenstein hope that it will be a helpful guide to financial advisors as they do their own research and build their own tech stack in the ever-changing software environment. They want to thank the more than 5,100 advisors who took the time to provide user ratings. They also want to thank Salesforce for its sponsorship.