To put it another way, we have got used to controlling our environment in lots of ways with our phones. What if we did not have to?
Apple Watch and the new iPad Pro range have something similar with the “Hey Siri” function, which wakes the assistant up, but in the main the commands Siri can help you with are still designed to get you to interact with the phone, watch or ‘fondleslab’ in whatever way. The Echo is much more stark than that.
And no, the Echo will not change your life at the moment – but it and things like it will, sometime in the next 10-20 years, or maybe even sooner. And all of what it does will be about removing those little points of friction and reducing the emotional price we pay for doing what we are doing.
Technical friction
This theme is not the Echo, though, it is friction; specifically friction inside the technology we all use in this business we call show, or financial services.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently because at my company we have been putting together our 2016 advised platform guide, which will be out by the time you read this at a frankly derisory price, whatever the price is. Naked punting there, but I do not get paid for writing this column and a cat’s got to eat.
One of the things we have been looking at in depth is client reporting and how clients can interact with their investments. We have been thoroughly depressed by what we have found. Here are a few of the low-lights:
• On most platforms, clients cannot find out what investment growth they have had; which is to say reporting is time-weighted, not money-weighted. They can see fund performance stats, and they can see if they have got more or less money than this time last year or half-year, but they cannot see what the change in value in their portfolio is.
• Still only one platform – True Potential – offers goal tracking, even for retirement savings.
• Few platforms have a client mobile offering, and fewer, still have a decent one.
As amazing as it seems, there are still advisers who maintain that clients are not interested in their money and that they should have to contact an adviser to get a valuation. This is daft on many levels, but for our purposes today let’s just say that putting friction in the process for clients and increasing the emotional price someone has to pay is a pretty bad idea.
