Ameriprise unveiled a new seven-point strategy aimed at helping its nearly 10,000 advisors grow their businesses and improve the client experience, called, with some grandiosity, the "Ultimate Advisor Partnership." To do it, the firm has invested in building and rolling out new technology over the last 12 months.
“If you think about all the things an independent advisor has to do with their time—they’ve got to market their business, they’ve got to process business, they’ve got to manage assets, they’ve got to source new clients,” said Bill Williams, executive vice president of the Ameriprise Independent Advisors channel. “We’ve had this vision of trying to look at all things an advisor has to pay attention to, and figure out how to improve it, streamline, maximize it.”
The firm has been quietly building many of the elements of the Partnership behind the scenes. For one, Ameriprise has completely revamped its advisor technology hub, now called the Practice Tech Platform, Williams said. It partnered with Salesforce to revamp the CRM system and link all the key things a practice has to do in a day, including trade reports, practice performing reports, business processing reports, delegation to staff on behalf of clients and preparation for upcoming meetings. All those tasks are integrated into a single tech hub that the firm is currently training advisors how to use.
The firm has also built out a turnkey digital marketing system to help advisors with their interactive websites, social media and direct mail strategies. These too are accessible via a centralized hub to make it easy to set marketing parameters. Advisors are also now assigned a marketing coach to manage the strategy with them behind the scenes.
Asset management capabilities are also now part of the single application, and the firm has simplified the way to set up accounts, document asset allocation and fiduciary accountability. The system helps an advisor document an asset allocation model based on the client’s risk tolerance and automatically rebalances the portfolio—a process that’s still done manually at most firms, Williams says.
Some of the new platform is built off of legacy data and technology, but the advisor interface is new.
The firm has also created coaching teams focused on specific disciplines within an advisors' business. There’s a team that works on marketing, a team that works on the asset management side, and a team that helps each advisor build out a business plan for the next year. This is at no additional cost for the firm’s franchisees.
“It’s really unique in the independent space to have actual leaders in the field that are paid for by the company to help our independent advisors take advantage of all the elements that are part of ‘The Ultimate Advisor Partnership,’” Williams said. “We felt it was time after making the investment, connecting it all digitally, and then building out the leadership team to tell that story.”
Ameriprise claims its advisors grow 2.5 times faster on average than key competitors. That’s based on the firm’s trailing 12-months revenue per advisor through Sept. 30, 2019, compared with the median revenue per advisor at LPL Financial, Edward Jones, Raymond James’ private client group, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America Wealth Management.
At the end of 2020, Ameriprise said the average trailing-12-months production for its advisors was $674,000, up from $664,000 a year ago, but that was mitigated by the low interest rate environment.