My vaccuum knows me better than my financial advisor

I want to tell you about my vaccuum. I discovered something interesting about it recently as I watched it learning the most efficient way to clean our new home. In some ways this device knows me better than my financial advisor. For example:

• By knowing location and size of my home it can estimate the value;
• It can derive how many creatures - human or furry - live in the home based on seats around the table and patterns of dirt in different rooms;
• It has lots of signals about my lifestyle - whether I cook or eat out, work from home, am away for extended periods and even when I buy new things.

So what does this have to do with financial advice? Well it matters because the boundaries of the Wealth Management industry are shifting. When I started my career nearly 30 years ago, it was mostly about facilitating transactions. Then it evolved to managing portfolios and over time, has evolved to include financial planning, tax and estate advice. This scope is only continuing to grow, touching business succession, wealth transfer, philanthropy and more.

With this expanded lens, advisors have had to shift from providing all the advice to curating the advice of others - some inside and some outside the firm. As this continues, firms won't be able to own every aspect of the experience and they'll have to focus on cultivating ecosystems.

While the trend toward an open product shelf is well established, the trend toward open data is just getting started. Picture a world where firms have the opportunity to leverage digital signals from all aspects of our lives, and use AI to reason over this data to identify patterns of behaviour. I heard once that an insurance company identified a negative correlation between people who hold a library card and claim rates. You better believe that algorithms can identify something about my financial behaviour from the data collected by my vaccuum

And if you think this is a distant future, it's happening right now. Think about Collaborations like:

• Google and its growing list of bank partners;
• Goldman Sachs and Apple;
• John Hancock and Amazon's new Halo device.

These collaborations will no doubt grow the Wealth Management pie, but they'll also shift how it's distributed. Financial industry leaders all need to be thinking about who might be gathering data about their clients, who it's being shared with, and what they might be able to do with it.

Wealth leaders should also be looking at what opportunities devices like this might create to better serve their customers. Cloud-based data and AI technology offers the ability to integrate data from all sorts of connected devices. The data from my vaccuum provides some interesting insights, but what if that was combined with data from my kitchen appliances, Strava, Walgreens and my car?

Certain big tech companies have been assembling powerful digital composites of consumers from their own proprietary data sources, which of course they use to extend their competitive advantage. Incumbents can combat this existential threat by partnering with leaders in other industries to create ecosystems that meet their customers' needs in unique and differentiated ways. And there can be other benefits of this type of cross-industry collaboration. Just as diverse teams produce better decisions, firms that combine different industry lenses may produce more compelling customer experiences.

Most importantly, any strategy that contemplates leveraging customer data in this way must be built on a foundation of conspicuous disclosure, informed consent and ethical AI.

The ideas I've put forward here are based on observing the things that might provide useful signals about my life. I'm curious to hear yours!