Does hybrid advice provide the best customer experience?

If product and client experience architect treat hybrid advice simply as a means to cut costs and make their system more efficient, it can be damaging to the customer experience as the end user can feel as though you are rushing to digital options for the sake of your bottom line. However, if as product and client experience designers we treat digital capabilities and channels as  "tools" to draw on when the client problem calls for it then hybrid advice can be impactful both to the client and the provider. 

What have you seen firms struggle with the most when trying to implement a hybrid model of advice?

Implementing a hybrid model of advice may not work if when it's picked for the wrong reasons. In addition, when it comes to designing hybrid advice experiences, we also have to be willing to amend our understanding of what "advice" means. Advice has a regulatory definition as well as a product definition (e.g. managed products). However, in the eyes of the consumer it comes in different shades, and the designer of a hybrid experience has to take that under consideration. For example, the digital "advice" features  are just as important, if not more, than just managing their money. This may be how you design logins, contributions, tracking, "raise cash" functions, stress tests, factoring the investor's values or social/societal priorities, etc. 

Do you think a wholly automated wealth management service is a possibility?

I think we are in the phase of such continuous evolution that it is impossible to answer that with absolute certainty in either direction. I think that the key is to treat each technological innovation as an opportunity to solve real client and delivery problems. If we focus on how innovations solve the problems of today, it will help us not only address real issues, but open our minds to the possibility of how the use of these technological innovations can continue to be embedded in our client experience. To use a different industry to serve as an analogy, it's about framing the question as "how features of self-driving vehicles address today's driving challenges" (i.e., blind-spot alerts, auto-breaks, lane drift alerts, etc.), as opposed to "stressing over when, or if, self-driving vehicles will one day make driving obsolete." 

What would you like to achieve by attending the 3rd Edition Digital Transformation in Wealth Management Conference?

I'd like to learn from other experts on experiences and to challenge my own assumptions.