June 01, 2021

Portfolio Integration and Connecting the Financial Dots with Eric Lordi & Rose Palazzo

30 minutes

In this episode, Jack Sharry talks with Rose Palazzo and Eric Lordi from Morgan Stanley. Rose heads financial planning while Eric leads efforts across WealthDesk, a place for advisors to manage household portfolios. At Morgan Stanley, Rose and Eric have been instrumental in building the industry’s most comprehensive wealth management platform.

Creating a comprehensive ecosystem and saying goodbye to the more siloed industry standard is no easy feat. Eric and Rose have leaned on their prospective specialties to build a system that scales rather than a system where one person wears 10 hats and inevitably drops a few along the way.

Jack, Rose, and Eric discuss the magic and challenges of account integration, why integration benefits both client and advisor, and the future of financial technology.

“When we talk about moving from accumulation to decumulation, it actually really is the time when it’s most important for the portfolios to be working in concert with each other, as one sort of orchestra instead of being managed in pieces. We know that’s really critically important.” ~ Rose Palazzo

Main takeaways

The goal of WealthDesk is to build a connected client experience that eliminates frequent disconnects throughout a client-advisor relationship. It’s crucial for clients to understand how investment advice is directly supporting their personal and financial goals. This connectivity benefits the advisor, the client, and ultimately, the firm.

Integration is the future of financial technology. Personalized advice is becoming more and more commonplace so technology needs to automate parts of an advisors’ workload. That way advisors have the time to dig deeper with each client and develop a more personalized plan.

Surfacing guidance for advisors is key to helping them understand the benefits of different tools. In other words, we know what the best practices are, but we still need to find a way to automate surfacing those best practices and do so in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming and aligns with advisor goals.

Half the battle of building an innovative product is connecting the dots within a large organization. Getting people out of their silos is incredibly tough, but it’s important to help people realize that everyone is working toward the same end goal.

Links

WealthDesk

Morgan Stanley

Rose on LinkedIn

Eric on LinkedIn

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Jack Sharry on LinkedIn

Jack Sharry on Twitter

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By LifeYield

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