By YOUNG MONEY Staff
19 October 2011

The wealth management industry has slowly begun to adopt some of the new technologies that have taken the market by storm, according to a new report from the consulting agency Aite Group.

The report looked at operations at 15 firms in North America and compared responses with a similar survey conducted in 2008, around what could be considered the beginning of the modern smartphone era.

According to Financial Planning, the report found a growing number of companies had developed platforms for social media and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and a substantial 65 percent of respondents felt that this new technology was important to the business.

However, a contrary group still remains in the industry, with 23 percent still insisting that mobile devices are unimportant to wealth management.

"You have to remember that the advisor force is in terms of average age pretty advanced," Alois Pirker, research director at Aite Group and author of the report, told Financial Planning. "Clearly there's a residual amount of people who just don't want to have anything to do with it."

Pirker noted, however, that most companies have realized that this technology is not going away and that integration will eventually prove to be an important distinction in the industry.