That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew…
A few years ago, we started a journey that spawned from a simple acknowledgement. An advisor’s true value proposition is to be at the center of a client’s financial life. This is achieved by proactively guiding the client through a life cycle of financial decisions. However, managing clients’ investment portfolios, reviewing financial plans every 18 months, and reactively answering one-off questions is the current state of affairs.
At our advisory firm, we surveyed the landscape, and although there were good planning tools available from which to derive analytical conclusions, there was no wealth management platform to help us service our clients along our value proposition. Proactively managing our clients’ financial situations every day through brute force would have been economically prohibitive. As the advisor’s value proposition has evolved into a wealth manager, the software platforms have remained in a state of arrested development. To achieve this vision of wealth management, we began to create inStream.
We initially released inStream to a small set of advisors to help us through the concept, and to the general advisor audience shortly thereafter. Along the way, we began to refine our offering based on client feedback while still maintaining our mission of creating a wealth management platform that allows the advisor to be at the center of a client’s financial life. Although a tall order, it is something worth building!
During this time, we have learned from our mistakes and our successes. We have also gained a significant following of advisors who share our vision. We have been flattered by the great reviews from the advisory press regarding our platform and direction, and we have been encouraged by other planning tools beginning to include our language in their marketing (good to know we are making waves). Excellent progress, but our story is just beginning!
With this mounting momentum, the desire and resources to bring you a state of the art wealth management platform have grown and strengthened beyond our expectations. I see a future where we can band together as advisors and lead the way. We do not react to the advances of technology from outsiders showing us how to run our advisory business. We envision the future that is most effective for our clients’ success and make it so.
We envision a future where the advisor is at the center of the client’s financial life by proactively guiding him or her through a life cycle of financial decisions and coordinating subsequent services. This is why clients have advisors. And just as important we also envision a future where an advisor can provide this type of wealth management approach effectively and efficiently to a greater set of clients. This is what leads the industry into the next charge forward.
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