Tales from the digital experience frontier

Tales from the Digital Experience Frontier Recap of InvestCloud’s 2015 Client User Conference Jonathan Bentley – Chief Content Officer InvestCloud held its Second Annual Client User Conference in Orlando, Florida last week, and received strong, positive feedback from the sessions. Therefore, over the course of the next several weeks, we will be summarizing these key sessions in more detail on NewThink. Despite hosting more attendees at this year’s User Conference, InvestCloud was still able to maintain the same level of intimacy and executive access that so many clients have said was one of the primary benefits of the conference. The theme of this year’s User Conference was built around the “Digital Experience”, an anchor concept in European cloud delivery, which is only now beginning to gain traction in the US. The digital experience was deeply emphasized over the 3-day event as for the financial sector; it goes well beyond simply adding reporting functionality to your client portal. The digital experience encompasses all of the internal and external touch points for gathering, integrating and deploying content and functionality through the cloud to both clients and staff. It not only includes websites, but also cloudbased applets that support the functions and business processes required to manage an investment organization.

InvestCloud’s CEO and Co-founder, John Wise, started the conference with three core words: Fulfillment, Function and Form. These are the perfect organizing metaphors for understanding the power of InvestCloud’s platform.

“Fulfillment” sets the foundation of InvestCloud. It is all about how the scope, structure and quality of the data your firm manages directly affects how well a firm can integrate and leverage the wide array of external data and content sources aggregated in InvestCloud’s Interactive Data Repository (IDR TM).

On the other hand, “Function” is all about the applets we overlay on top of the data repository using our generated PWPTM approach. For this element John had compared our applet approach to giant Lego TM blocks that can be variously assembled in hundreds of alternative configurations tailored to a firms specific requirements.

Lastly, “Form” refers to amazingly flexible screen views and creative design that is possible when the user experience is no longer dictated by the programmers writing inflexible code, which is something core to the InvestCloud platform.

Apart from that, InvestCloud’s Co-Founder and Head of Sales, Michael Smith, gave an overview of how to stage the digital experience. Breaking it into two sections, one for the digital “requirement” and the second for the digital “edge”,

Michael detailed 10 stages of adoption. The digital requirement now entails having a marketing website, employing online data acquisition and using that to create a client portal experience involving both documents as well as interactive data driven reporting. The standard set by the global banks and wirehouses is now expected of all service providers. The most interesting part of Michael’s presentation was his discussion of the digital edge. These are elements of functionality that are being adopted by our progressive and leading edge clients.

These include the addition of broader content integration, including social media, account aggregation, goals based planning, risk profiling and model portfolio alignment, as well as the hybrid inclusion of Robo–adviser functionality.

During the conference, InvestCloud team members presented the new color configurations to help organize applet groupings. First was “Blue”, a more comprehensive array of client reporting applets. Second was “Orange”, which addresses front middle and back office functionality related to portfolio management, trade execution, and compliance. Third was “Pink”, a radical Robohybrid configuration. The last color discussed was “Navy”, InvestCloud’s new applet configuration for supporting asset allocators.

InvestCloud’s Chief Architect Officer, Vincent Sos, introduced “piping”, a new methodology from InvestCloud that uses a simple hashtag format similar to Twitter, to capture and deliver unstructured data to your CRM or content management applications.

The conference wrapped up with several clients and partners sharing stories about their implementations of the InvestCloud platform.

Drilling deeper into the key sessions, we will begin next week’s NewThink article with more on John’s session on Fulfillment, Function, and Form. If you would like to learn more about the InvestCloud platform, visit our new website at www.investcloud.com or click here to request for a demo.

Jonathan Bentley leads InvestCloud’s content development and management division. From helping advisors better craft and deliver their stories to curating customized advisor RSS site feeds, Jonathan’s team is critical to InvestCloud’s bespoke design and site management services. Jonathan was previously founder and CEO of LightPort Inc, which merged with InvestCloud in 2013.

Previously a practicing RIA, while at LightPort, Jonathan was involved in developing web portals for more than 500 advisors and money managers.