Advisors ready to get their hands on Veo One, TD Ameritrade Institutional’s new technology dashboard, will have to wait a little longer.
After introducing the technology at last year’s National LINC conference, Veo One is now in beta testing mode with a select group of registered investment advisors. John Patullo, the managing director of technology product management at TD Ameritrade Institutional, said the company plans to make Veo One widely available to its advisors in the fall.
That doesn’t mean they’ve been sitting on their hands. When it debuted Veo One – which promises to be a sort of one-stop shop where advisors can access CRM, financial planning tools and portfolio management from a single desktop – last year, it only had five software integrations available. Now there are 14, and Patullo said TD will continue to scale the product like it has with Veo Open Access, which now boasts more than 100 integration partners.
“[Veo One is] going to be able to take advantage of a lot of technology trends we’re seeing in the world such as social, mobile, and analytics in the cloud,” Patullo said. “It’s really going to set up advisors for a lot of future success.”
Patullo added that his team is also building more features into Veo One, such as trading, and making it easier for vendors to integrate their systems as easily as they can with Veo Open Access.
“Next year at this time, we’ll have a host of more vendors on the platform, most of the Veo functionality there, and be probably in the midst of replacing the Veo platform.”
Though the plan is to eventually completely migrate over to Veo One, TD plans for Open Access to co-exist for a while. The strategy allows TD to provide RIA firms with the latest and greatest technology while still supporting firms that are invested in their legacy systems.
“We’re really all about open architecture; that flexibility for advisors to be able to pick and choose a system that best meets their needs,” Patullo said. “To change a portfolio management system is not an easy task. It’s timely, costly, and [firms] have to train their staff.”
TD is making it clear at the 2016 National LINC conference in Orlando that it wants more advisors to buy into technology. In an address Thursday morning, TD Ameritrade Institutional president Tom Nally named “taking advantage of technology” as one of the most critical issues facing advisors, along with restoring client trust and better communicating the value of financial advice.
He made a point to show that only 8 percent of advisors currently offer a digital advice solution, while only another 20 percent are even considering it. Though Nally said that this is a huge opportunity for RIAs to grow, adding that automation will be as transformative to the industry as CRM and portfolio management software was, he said its about helping advisors, not replacing them.
“Being human is always going to be a good thing in this business.”