Advisors have been seeking ever greater efficiency and more seamless integration between their tools for all 19 of the years I’ve been covering advisor technology.
I first explicitly touched on the availability of workflow automation back in 2011 and, two years later, quasi-defined the concept in another piece as the “modern-day convergence of repeatable processes meeting technology.”
From that time onward, workflow creation was primarily a specialization often found in CRM platforms. However, what I heard from advisors back then and continue to hear today is how time-consuming and tedious it can be to create them.
“They don’t like CRM workflows, they hate them all, it doesn’t matter whose,” said Anand Sheth, the founder and CEO of Pulse360, the popular software as a service platform that helps financial advisors automate and streamline creation of client deliverables.
I spoke to Sheth about the announcement this week made by the workflow management and automation platform Hubly (now a part of Docupace), which harnesses the AI-driven output of three partners, including his Pulse360 and the AI assistants Jump and GReminders, to in turn automatically trigger, assign, or in some cases complete related tasks or next steps for the advisor.
To be clear, these are separate API-based integrations between Hubly and each of the three, meaning that to take advantage of them, an advisor must be a customer of both Hubly and one of the three.
If that is the case, the promise of the announcement is that the integrations will help advisory practices using them become more synchronized and automated, or to oversimplify, I’ll call it reaching workflow automation 2.0.
As Hubly co-founder Louis Retief described it to me, the new integrations are about bringing or extending what these three tools can do for the advisor in the front office to achieve real work and automation in the back office.
“What happens when the advisor steps out of the client meeting?” he asked me rhetorically.
“They are great at triggering the work but not doing the work,” he said. And that is where Hubly comes in, from an automation standpoint, helping to automatically trigger the work process that needs to be done, and not just on behalf of one-off individual clients or prospects, but completed in bulk for a number of them.
“We are a task router,” said Retief.
In other words, an AI assistant like Jump or GReminders doesn’t just take notes; it uses conversations and datapoints from them to then go one or several steps further and trigger the client engagement process from within Hubly. A calendar doesn’t just book a time; it assigns the prep work for the meeting and so on.
Arnulf Hsu, founder and CEO of AI-notetaking, meeting and automation platform GReminders, reminded me that its tools are all about the end-to-end meeting lifecycle.
“We manage the meeting lifecycle, and Hubly allows you to go beyond that, engaging with more of your tech stack,” and doing so, driven by data coming from GReminders (or the other two partners).
“Data islands aren’t doing anybody any good,” he said, telling me that these new integrations make the tech stack an advisory practice already has even more capable of doing work that in the past had to be assigned to a human.
“Ideally, we say AI is the invisible partner, to the extent that AI can help you automate completing, say, certain fields or entire forms, or perform tasks related to account opening and do so on your behalf—and just have you confirm—that is where all this is going,” Hsu said.
“People who use Hubly love it, and they definitely have their system set up and often don’t use anything else in terms of workflow,” said Ty Harris, product manager at Jump.
Whether that is a new client workflow, an account opening workflow, a financial plan workflow, or any of the dozens of templates Hubly has, or that a firm can build using it.
“Let’s say an advisor has an initial discovery meeting with a client, now because of the integration, Jump, after the meeting, will be able to say here are the four workflows in Hubly we think should be kicked off and the advisor can then—we always have an advisor in the loop—can kick those off [with a click],” said Harris.
With the completion of the APIs, a firm can begin using the integrations by simply being in Jump (or one of the other two platforms) and providing their Hubly username and password.
The new paradigm advisors will need to wrap their minds around, as Sheth explained to me, is the mental shift of not always having to think about the multiple manual steps and individual tasks that created backlogs of issues in the past.
“Documentation is important for the client experience, it is important for compliance, and you have to get the work done,” said Sheth, who noted that, finally, the technology will increasingly be able to offload a lot of it.
Although a firm date has not yet been announced, developers will soon be able to access the Hubly API through the Docupace API Developer portal on the company’s website.
Hubly will co-host a webinar Jan. 15 featuring leaders from the three newly integrated platforms and demonstrating how all this AI-driven workflow automation will work.
