The WEALTHTECH Book

The Networked Client

By Blake Kannady

Vice President – Product Strategy, Director – User Experience, Envestnet, Inc.

At first light, sensors “wake” the house. The gate camera scans for one minute and subsequently deactivates the motion sensors. Unless I hit snooze, the blinds open at 8:59:58 with my phone that wakes me with a nifty app that was included in my last upgrade. My smart clock gives me a colourful pixilation of the forecast as I adjust my eyes to look out the real window, feet away. I stretch, pop out of bed and meet Alexa in the bathroom. She’s got a calendar briefing and then today’s financial headlines. I hear the espresso machine finishing as I descend the last stair and speak up loud enough to ask the remote to turn on the TV. Just as I sit down to breakfast, I get a text notification on my tablet – “Payday!” an overnight deposit. “Would you like to transfer your predicted surplus for the month to your Travel budget?”

This scene is not for the latest smart home tech that will allow you to float through life. What we are filming is for a new smart service. That smart service is one I can adopt aside from the other interactions, most of which were simulated. If I am being honest, I love to dream up how things should work, but take my personal application of them with a heaped spoon of cynicism. I generally mistrust sharing online, I am hesitant to deploy devices with “smart capabilities” for fear that they decrease in necessity as they increase vulnerabilities, ...