LPL Financial has hired Ashish Braganza as its new executive vice president of data, analytics and innovation. While LPL has had a center of excellence for data and analytics for the last five years, Braganza is tasked with taking these capabilities to the next level. He’ll be crafting a data strategy that spans the organization, from data governance and data quality on the front end to building models that drive insights in the middle and then putting those models into applications that advisors and clients can use.
He’ll report to Burt White, LPL managing director of investor and investment solutions.
“That entire life cycle from data quality, data governance, insights and analytics all the way to deployment and applications that drive outcomes is really all that Ashish's team is working on,” White said.
Braganza joins from OppenheimerFunds, where he served as senior vice president and head of client insights and analytics. Prior to that, he was a director of global analytics and business intelligence for Lenovo Group Limited, a consumer technology company.
He will work on a number of data enablements within the firm’s Advisor Sleeve technology, which was rolled out to its entire network recently. The firm has a team of eight data scientists working on modeling for a new analytics tool, coming later this summer, which will look at how an advisor trades and provide relevant insights, such as when earnings on a particular stock are near, timing for capital gains and performance parameters.
“You're helping to alert the advisor at their beginning, real time, to manage and be able to help them monitor that portfolio then give them insights so that they can then be able to make the decisions on how to drive decisions better, more effectively,” White said.
White also wants Braganza’s team to build models to optimize LPL’s products and services for advisors.
“What we know is that when advisors do certain activities and hit our websites in a certain way or start utilizing certain products, that will enable us to be able to say, ‘Here are some new services, or some next opportunities,’ so we can go and talk to them,” he said.
Braganza’s team will also be working on in-context help, which will allow advisors to get help where they are in the system, without having to pick up the phone or logging out of the system. To do that, the firm will build a content library and embed data so that the content can be distributed to advisors.
“We're already doing a lot of that today, but I think to institutionalize that across our system is something that Ashish will be working on to help deliver the content to the places that our advisors most need at the time that they need it.”
LPL has been designing its technology around different workflows that advisors use, such as turning a prospect into a client. That’s one of the reasons the firm bought AdvisoryWorld late last year, with its well-regarded proposal generation capabilities. Braganza will be working on bringing more marketing automation tools to that workflow. By analyzing the type of content prospects are most drawn to, the firm can help advisors customize proposals and build portfolios that best meet the needs of that client.
“When you have a prospect, you know a little bit about them, but not a lot; utilizing data and delivering it through marketing analytics allows you to begin to store those and create a lead score around what are the component pieces around those prospects,” White says.