Rethinking Opportunities for RIA Growth
OneDigital has revved up its pursuit of growth by aggressively building career pipelines and by utilizing artificial intelligence ‘coworkers.’
Photo by Anthony Collins
As the pool of retirement plan advisers ages and shrinks, the use of artificial intelligence rapidly increases, and a massive generational wealth transfer gets underway, some may think the potential for individual advisory and firm growth can decline. The way to combat the decline, according to Nate White, a senior vice president at OneDigital, is by adapting to the very forces that challenge the conventional forms of growth.
Speaking at a case study discussion at the PLANADVISER 360 Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 4, White said that while selling more retirement plans and acquiring more clients have been the standard ways for advisers to grow, OneDigital is looking to expand into more services, such as managed accounts and wealth management.
“Organic growth is hugely important. … Where are we going to find that?” White said. “There’s lots of paths that we have to go down to generate more revenue.”
Give Clients What They Want
Instead of letting go of clients who do not seem “profitable,” White suggested advisers think of ways to grow accounts by moving them into different retirement solutions.
“Is it a [pooled employer plan]? Is it a … home office solution where there’s a different advisory team attached to it, to make it more economical?” he asked. “How do we capture and retain those plans?”
OneDigital has engaged more with participants because “employees are asking for it,” according to White. He recommended that advisers meet the specific needs of client employees, a sentiment recently shared by NFP in its yearly retirement trend report.
Another way to meet clients’ needs is by building out practices in wealth management, White said. For most of his career, White was a retirement plan specialist, but four years ago, he branched into wealth management. “Now, almost 50% of revenue from our office in Kansas City is coming from wealth management,” he said.
People, AI Find Their ‘Voice’ in the Workplace
As AI promises to change the nature of financial advisers’ work, White said financial advisers have the choice to “do nothing, something or great things” with these tools. By White’s estimation, OneDigital has a team of “nearly 200” working on AI, and about half of that tally is composed of trained AI solutions that are so specialized to specific company verticals that they are referred to as “coworkers.”
OneDigital takes the personification even further, encouraging its human employees to think of their AI “coworkers” as personalities, rather than anonymous chatbots. The company named the “coworkers” and made “photos” of them, and White refers to the AI programs using male or female pronouns.
“Jackie,” for example, is an AI “coworker” that analyzes Form 5500s. “Ace” provides client service support. “Piper” is an automated deal closer.
White said “Piper” helps a retirement solutions team that focuses on small markets by answering advisers’ questions, such as: “How to best communicate with this particular client? How should you engage with them? What are they looking for?”
As for his human coworkers, White said OneDigital invests heavily in recruiting young professionals out of college for internships or junior-level positions. The young advisers are then responsible for engaging retirement plan participants and given the chance to partner with senior advisers on larger, complex corporate retirement plans.
White specifically mentioned that Jack Hull, a vice president of wealth management, and Anna Ciani, a wealth adviser, started in this OneDigital pipeline and now seek their own junior collaborators.
“Jack was one of those junior advisers [who] moved into a more senior role now, and Anna’s right behind him,” White said. “They’ve been kind of feeding the pipeline along the way.”