Wells Fargo is preparing to launch a set of tools in its mobile app meant to drive conversations between wealthy customers and financial advisors.
This has long been a Holy Grail for banks with wealthy clients: Advisors tend to meet with clients annually or quarterly, but many firms would like these conversations to take place more frequently, to reduce the risk of customers leaving and to gain more share of their investments.
"It's trying to increase collaboration, not diminish it," said Michael Liersch, head of advice and planning at Wells Fargo, said of the new Life Sync app component in an interview. "This is not supposed to replace that model of having an advisor and a client work deeply together. You're just trying to get them to focus on the aspect of that collaboration that matters most, which is, what is the client trying to accomplish and have that connect to their financial strategy."
Life Sync will launch on March 28 to wealth management clients. Over the next 12 months, Wells Fargo will roll it out to the rest of its client segments, including lending and consumer deposits.
Liersch and Michelle Moore, head of consumer and wealth investment management digital at Wells Fargo (and former head of digital banking at Bank of America), collaborated on the development of Life Sync.
At its core, Life Sync lets customers identify their financial goals, such as start a business, retire, save for a child's education or save for a vacation home, in collaboration with a financial advisor. They can add graphics for each goal, such as a photo of a golf course.
Each time a customer enters new information into the app, an alert pops up on the workstation of that customer's financial advisor. The advisor can then call the customer or make an adjustment to the overall plan. The client can click on a virtual business card to call the advisor.
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"So it isn't about just creating the conversation, it can actually be about implementing that strategy in the plan and then re-sharing with the client," Liersch said.
Life Sync also has a news feed of content curated to the user that is meant to mimic Instagram or LinkedIn, with articles on subjects like asset allocation and tax planning. It includes market views from the Wells Fargo Investment Institute and a podcast Liersch hosts, About Money, that addresses topics like retirement and family dynamics. Guest speakers have included musician Kevin Jonas of the Jonas Brothers band and Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy.
Under the "Vitals" section, the app tells users how they are doing vis a vis their goals and market conditions.
"This is a quick snapshot of what's going on in your life today," Moore said.
The Vitals section can provide comfort when markets dip, Liersch pointed out.
"This provides an alternative viewpoint, which is, how am I tracking toward my personalized benchmarks, my goals?" he said. "We did research where people told us they were doom scrolling their financial services apps to look at their account balances. What if they could go on to Life Sync and say, based on what I want to accomplish with my money, is there something to do or not to do regardless of whether those account balances are going up and down? Perhaps you have to make a trade or run a scenario, but that's going to be based off a personalized benchmark rather than just looking at some market indices."
Life Sync is an example of what several large banks are trying to do to reach young investors, according to Mark Schwanhausser, director of digital banking at Javelin Strategy and Research.
"All the leading banks are beginning to build what we call a bridge to investing," he said in an interview. "Right now, what banks have built is a rope bridge that's swaying in the wind with every step. Nobody has built anything close to the Golden Gate Bridge or the George Washington Bridge."
Today, many banks have do-it-yourself tools like loan calculators and generic self-help financial education.
"It's a real challenge to figure out how to find those nuggets that start conversations and help somebody see what they should be doing," Schwanhausser said. "This is a blueprint of what's going to come."
One anticipated benefit of Life Sync is that when clients interact on a mobile device, they tend to share more information, and especially around goals, Liersch said.
"That's just a material fact," he said. "Most likely it's because you're in the moment. Everyone's on their apps for five to eight hours a day. So when something comes to mind, we can just share it. What advisors get out of it is what's on clients' minds." And they get specifics: dollar amounts, time horizons, the exact label a client is giving each goal, and the people associated with those goals (for instance, children).
"The beauty of it is, it's timely and current and it creates a much deeper relationship versus transactional," Moore said in an interview. "If you're doing a financial plan with your advisor, maybe you catch up once a month, maybe once a quarter, once a year. But now it's personalized. You can look at your goals versus getting a PDF file with a bunch of graphs. Now it's human and it is something that you can have a constant dialogue with if you wish."
The idea that consumers will share more information through an app than through a human resonates with Schwanhausser. Typically to get to know customers, banks have them fill out a form or try to aggregate data about them, but they sometimes miss important pieces like taxes, outside investments or credit cards at other issuers, he said.
"All of these things make it difficult to go out and gather the information and develop a picture about that one customer," Schwanhausser said. "But another way, and we've been recommending this for quite some time, is to ask. "
To develop Life Sync, Moore and Liersch met every Thursday afternoon for the past year with teams of developers, designers, product managers, lawyers, risk managers, compliance experts and communications people, Moore said.
"Michael and I have read every line of code that has gone into Life Sync, because we want to make sure that it's easily understood by everyone," she said. "It's meant to be a tool that is intuitive, easy, simple to use. Michael and I can't sit around and meet with millions of clients. So we were very thoughtful about every choice of word."
Employees began testing the new features in early January and some changes have been made over the past two months.
Wells Fargo plans to launch its
