What It Takes to Build an Advisor Experience That Scales

Most Firms Buy the Tools First

A firm grows, a gap shows up, someone buys a tool to close it. Run that loop for a few years and you end up with a stack nobody designed and an advisor experience that is the sum of a dozen unrelated purchases. Advisors feel it as friction: one more login, one more workflow, one more decision about which vendor handles what.

Andina Anderson, Head of RIA Blueprint at Cetera, starts from the other end. "I am very passionate about creating an advisor experience," she says. "Advisors obviously are just trying to solve problems for their clients, and so we need to help advisors be able to do that."

There's a claim inside that worth pulling apart. Advisor experience isn't an internal convenience or an operations line item. It's what the client experience is built on top of. Every hour an advisor spends managing the tooling is an hour not spent on the relationship that actually grows the firm.

The goal she describes is a division of labor, not a feature set. "Part of that is thinking about being able to create an experience for them where they're focused on the things where they add value and where they're really benefiting their clients," she says, "and we can take all the rest of the burden from them." That second half is the harder commitment. Plenty of firms will tell advisors to focus on clients. Fewer will name themselves as the party responsible for everything else.

Define the Standard Before You Shop

Sequencing matters more than selection. Evaluating vendors against each other is easy. Evaluating them against a standard you wrote down first is harder, and it's the step most firms skip.

"We knew that it was on us to be able to select the best partners out there," Andina says. The standard came first: an experience seamless enough that advisors never have to think about which vendor handles which piece. Partners were chosen to meet that bar rather than to define it. "And so we obviously chose Orion because of being a leader in technology for the RIA," she says, "and also having a lot of the optionality and a lot of the functionality that we knew we were going to need to support our advisors and our clients."

A practical test for any firm, at any size: could you describe the experience you want your advisors to have without naming a single vendor? If you can't, your stack is writing your standard for you.

Build for the Range, Not the Average

Every firm has an average advisor on a slide somewhere. Almost nobody supports one.

The spread isn't really about advisors, though — it's about who they serve. "With RIAs and with advisors, they're generally trying to create the same experience for their client base," Andina says. "They're just trying to solve different needs." The work starts with naming those needs honestly: "So part of what we try to help them understand are the types of clients that they're servicing. So is it mass affluent? Is it high net worth? And making sure that they have the tools to meet all of their needs."

That's what turns optionality from a feature list into a design principle. "Part of that is being able to offer some optionality within the technology," she explains, "so that they can have more comprehensive or more simple, whichever is relevant to them." One advisor wants performance reporting deep enough to sit with a high-net-worth client for an hour. Another wants the version that takes four minutes. Neither is wrong, and a platform that only serves one of them has quietly chosen its advisors.

"All of our clients are going to need something a little bit different," she says.

Designing for the range costs more upfront than designing for the median. It's also the difference between a firm that scales and one that grows until its one-size model starts pushing people out the door.

Let AI Absorb the Work, Not the Advice

Most AI conversations in this industry collapse into one of two positions: it changes everything, or it changes nothing. Andina's answer is narrower and more useful — it depends entirely on which part of the job you're talking about.

On the advice itself, she's unambiguous. "I don't think it's ever going to replace an advisor," she says. "It won't be able to provide that level of advice support, especially in the RIA world when we're thinking about such a mix of clients and personas." The variety is the point. A book of business that spans mass affluent and high net worth, accumulation and decumulation, is a book where the right answer is particular to the person asking.

On the work around the advice, she's just as direct about the upside: AI "can really be used to leverage to better understand clients, to better offer them solutions, to better address pain points, to make you more efficient within your practice, to understand operationally where are you spending too much time."

That last one is the most actionable and the most skipped. Firms tend to reach for AI as a capability to add rather than a lens on where the hours are going. Diagnosis first, then the decision about what to do with what you find — "how either technology or outsourcing or whatever it is can take away some of that burden."

Which lands back where the whole thing started. "So again," she says, "the advisor and the people within your firm can really focus on where they're adding value." The tools change; the division of labor is the same one she opened with.