Real-Time as it Ought to Be

You’re a young couple struggling with debt service. Or a retiree spending more than your planned budget. Your water heater has broken and you need $2,000 now for a new 80-gallon tank. Should you take it out of savings? Or out of an investment? Some extra cash has been deposited into one of your accounts. Should you save it, invest it, or use it to pay down a debt?

With one-click access to all real-time data across banking, lending and investing, a financial advisor can equip clients to make smart decisions in the moment – not after the problem has gotten out of hand.

This is real-time in action. And it’s a high-value service that can be provided by tech-forward advisors powered by a modern, service-focused custodian.

In this new world, it’s important to distinguish between real real-time and faux real-time. Faux: What we’re told is “real time” is typically nothing more than an approximation. It’s often called “near” real-time, an oxymoron. It’s either real or it’s not. Faux real-time is client data cleverly designed to appear real-time on the screen.

By contrast, real real-time is relentlessly, reliably now. Its data is instantaneous; timed to anticipate an event, or coincide with it, and pulled the moment relevance fades.

Real-time spells the end of latent work like batch processing, multi-day and overnight processes, and even same-day settlement. And it heralds a new relationship between financial organizations and their clients – a transformation unfolding across the board, from mobile-banking apps to digital advice to peer-to-peer lending. To achieve real-time service levels, we need – and clients are demanding – new architecture for our industry’s foundational systems, architecture allows financial transactions to become instantaneous and substantially less expensive. That’s real-time in action.

Read more about my thoughts on this concept in my latest piece in ThinkAdvisor, here.