Personalizing whole portfolios at scale

What’s key for the future of wealth management? For clients, it’s personalization. They want portfolios to align with their individual preferences and financial goals. For advisors, it’s the ability to scale in a personalized way. They want to expand their business to serve more clients and clients’ needs.

The ability to personalize whole portfolios at scale with technology is influencing the direction our industry is headed. That was the theme at our Aladdin Wealth™ Executive Forum this year, Wealth Tech 2025. Wealth leaders discussed their thoughts on the next several years of managing client portfolios, and here’s what we learned.

To start, how technologically equipped are advisors?

“We’re all going to have to be using more and more technology,” Chairman and CEO Larry Fink told wealth management attendees. From supporting portfolio construction processes with enhanced risk oversight to enabling the management of multiple accounts as part of a household, technology is the equipment for growth.

Adopting technology

But the industry is not necessarily equipped today. Although technology is available, advisors haven’t fully adopted it yet in its various forms. That was a top highlight from the sessions.

In fact, many speak of technology as a “side” item to wealth management, COO and Head of BlackRock Solutions Rob Goldstein noted at the event. But technology isn’t something to be served on the side to wealth management. “They’re actually one thing.” By 2030, he opined that conversations about the future of wealth management would naturally center on technology.

So, what is the role of technology?

Personalization as the pivot

Let’s take a step back in time. “It was only about 100 years ago, that Henry Ford said you can have any colored car as long as it was black,” Woo Fung Kwong, Co-Head of Aladdin Wealth Tech, said at the forum. It was difficult to scale then, and perhaps even harder to personalize such products.

What about today? “It’s all about personalization,” Woo said. Times have changed, and now, client demand for personalization and scale are impacting the advisory sector.

We’ve reached an inflection point in the industry where client demand is so strong that wealth management firms need to make the pivot. Technology is making that pivot possible in ways that didn’t exist just a decade ago. This was another core point from the conference.

Total client wealth

“I think that it all starts with the end client,” said Rob. The wealth management industry will have to meet consumer expectations. Across industries, consumer expectations are evolving as people seek increasingly user-friendly technologies that help manage their lives. Nowadays, consumers can buy groceries or get targeted movie recommendations at the click of a button.

One of the ways the wealth manager can personalize portfolios is by addressing a client’s total worth. “You can’t be looking at client’s financial goals and come up with a solution that only has part of the answer,” Woo said. Sourcing information about a client’s external assets is considered the “holy grail of the industry.” That’s because it enables advisors to help clients achieve goals based on all the assets they own. The full picture. And that makes for a more aligned relationship.

Aggregating portfolio data

This wider lens is also important in the data realm. Data is only as effective as what’s in the system, and how it’s interpreted by those who view it.

Technology platforms can aggregate data to generate insights that help advisors make sense of what’s occurring at deeper levels of the portfolio. What technology can do for data was another central trend of the forum. Industry experts also noted that advisor teams are getting larger, and with that, comes the need for operational scale, which would be harder to manually orchestrate.

Alex Pape, Head of Enterprise Product and Head of SMA Tech at Aladdin Wealth Tech, shared his observation that firms have multiple types or versions of technology, which creates layers of complexity when evaluating data. Aggregating portfolio data in one system adds credibility to the data. It also makes it easier to analyze large data sets and for multiples team, including supporting functions, to coordinate with each other.

Emphasis on relationships

All that said, it’s moot unless advisors can build strong client narratives and advisor-client experiences, according to Venu Krishnamurthy, Co-Head of Aladdin Wealth Tech, speaking to the audience.

Ultimately, the relationships that advisors build with their clients will continue to steer what matters, and technology is the vessel that can help advisors get there.

Equipping your teams with Aladdin Wealth™

Aladdin Wealth™ is a risk engine powering the future of wealth management with timely portfolio analytics. Advisors can customize scalable portfolios with the help of Personalized Portfolio Management Technology. Tax considerations and client preferences are simple to express in the platform.

Wealth managers can configure the platform in many ways, and it’s able to grow as advisors grow. It is a “unifier,” Larry said in the forum, to help all enterprise teams – from advisors to portfolio managers – point their compasses in the same direction when constructing portfolios for clients.