Cerulli finds tech stacks now central to advisor productivity, retention, and recruiting battles
Banks are accelerating investment in digital infrastructure as wealth management units confront a tightening advisor labor market and rising client expectations.
New research from Cerulli Associates shows that technology has moved from a supporting role to a defining factor in where advisors choose to build their careers. It found that 80% of advisors say a firm’s technology stack influences their decision to remain with or move to another employer, underscoring how central digital capabilities have become in the competition for talent.
Matt Zampariolo, research analyst at Cerulli, has been sharing more from the report with InvestmentNews and says that technology is now directly tied to advisor satisfaction, productivity, and retention with banks prioritizing tools that remove friction from daily advisory work.
“According to our 2025 study of Private Bank & Trust Advisors, the tools most highly in demand from advisors and their teams to facilitate productivity and operational efficiency are: e-Signature (DocuSign), financial planning tools (eMoney, MoneyGuide, etc.), and CRM tools (Salesforce, etc.),” he said. “I wouldn't call any of these technologies new per se, however when speaking with and surveying advisors, these were most highly regarded in terms of enhancing their practice's productivity.”
AI adoption
While foundational platforms remain essential, banks are also testing newer solutions. Artificial intelligence is gaining attention, though adoption varies by channel.
“AI is the biggest focus for a lot of firms; however, adoption has been slower in the retail bank/bank trust space (29% adoption according to advisors) as opposed to Private Banks (56% adoption in 2025),” said Zampariolo. “Banks are also looking to upgrade their client portals/websites, mobile applications and account aggregation tools as these are highly in demand from end-investors, particularly younger ones.”
Advisors adopting advanced planning and CRM systems report meaningful workflow improvements once implementation hurdles are cleared. Of the 90% of banks that leverage financial planning tools, they are also used by almost all advisors who have access to them; just 8% of advisors have not yet integrated such tools into their practice.
“Financial planning tools offload a huge amount of manual document creation and help in creating scenario analyses and client-ready outputs that would otherwise need to be run and built manually,” said Zampariolo. “There tends to be an upfront time investment to load all of a clients financials and personal information into the systems, but we've heard that once that initial time is spent, these tools heavily improve the planning experience for advisors.”
Despite growing budgets, rolling out new systems remains a challenge for many institutions and Zampariolo noted that prior to roll-out, one of the biggest challenges banks face is the high associate cost affiliated with implementation (cited by 55% of bank executives).
Once onboarded, however, the biggest challenge is data input and incompatibility of legacy systems (cited by 29% of bank executives).
“Financial planning tools in particular require a significant amount of manually inputted data from advisors and their teams; again, this is an upfront time investment that is largely considered worth the effort once done, but we've heard time expectations of weeks even up to months to get all of their clients financials into these systems once they're rolled out,” explained Zampariolo.
Other qualitative challenges are just adoption/buy-in from senior staff who are used to doing things their own way, and possible compliance/regulatory issues, specifically in the bank wealth space which can oftentimes be overseen by several bodies including the OCC, FDIC and other local or national regulatory agencies (SEC if they have an affiliate RIA or broker/dealer, for example.)”
Measuring the payoff from technology investments remains a work in progress. Zampariolo said it's hard to say quantitatively, however “oftentimes we'll hear advisors or their firms boast x% reduction in client touchpoints based on some client-facing tools, or general statements on enhanced outcomes in the financial planning and investment realm when onboarding more advanced tools.”
Top challenges
When looking at bank executives perspective on the top challenges facing their businesses in 2025, Cerulli found the top-three were all related to technology and advisor recruitments: Recruiting retaining talent (74%), Client experience/digital offering (62%), Technology systems (44%).
“The largest overall challenge facing bank wealth management programs is their ability to hire, train and retain productive & profitable advisors, and 80% of these advisors are saying they seriously consider technology as a part of a firm's offering when deciding where to conduct their business.”
Cerulli’s findings point to a clear trend of banks that invest in modern advisor tools, streamlined workflows, and stronger digital client experiences gaining an edge in productivity and talent retention, while lagging institutions risk falling behind in an increasingly technology-driven advisory marketplace.
