The priority of financial firms isn’t just securing clients but keeping them. That’s achieved, at least in part, through a seamless and satisfying user experience. When it comes to robo advisors, that user experience starts at the secure site dashboard.
Corporate Insight recently published a report on secure site dashboards for a swath of firms that offer automated investing services. While many of these dashboards sport similarities, showcasing an industry-wide adherence to UX convention, key differences did emerge in the course of our research, highlighting potential areas of improvement and diverging customer experience philosophies.
When a client logs into a robo advisor, their experience can vary widely by firm. Some firms highlight clients’ progress towards predetermined goals, while others emphasize the returns of the automatically advised portfolio. And while all the firms we researched recognize the importance of a wholistic view of accounts held internally, only about two thirds allow clients to integrate external account balances into their dashboards. Though some might see this as unwittingly inviting the competition into their platform, offering clients a full view of their financial picture from a firm dashboard increases the likelihood that clients will login to that site to manage their wealth. This reflects a cross-industry trend of offering more account aggregation and personal financial management tools, and potentially removes friction from that client opening additional accounts and increasing investments with the firm. Morgan Stanley embodies this in their aggregate dashboard, with extensive opportunity to incorporate external accounts.
Firms also take different approaches to presenting their robo advisors’ returns on the dashboard. Some firms put the information front and center on their robo dashboards, such as Wealthfront, which presents not just overall returns in both a number and graphs, but allows clients to specify specific date ranges within that data. For more established accounts with greater longevity, this graph encourages continued investment as the trend of returns continues upward. Yet such presentation risks encouraging panic in younger, less established investors who face significant percentage losses in the beginning of their investment journey, especially when those losses stare them in the face each time they log in.
Vanguard chooses a different avenue with its Digital Advisor robo dashboard, burying all performance data within secondary tabs. The firm instead encourages a forward look to investors through a hypothetical projection chart that plots milestones on the path to retirement. This approach promotes long-term investment by putting current market fluctuations in the back seat. Yet even though historical performance data is available, the firm’s choice does reduce the immediate transparency offered by other firms, which may not bode well with some prospective clients. However, the firm likely made this design choice to position its robo as an overarching financial planning tool rather than simply a portfolio manager.
In our research we also found differences in how firms present goals and use dashboards to promote other internal accounts and products. The full report is available on the client portal to subscribers. Automated Investment Monitor provides monthly reports, giving subscribers a steady stream of insight into how the competition positions their products and secure sites to attract and retain clients. Learn more about how Automated Investment Monitor and our other brokerage research services can help your organization reach its goals.
Tim Drugan
Tim Drugan is an analyst on CI's asset management research team.