With the emergence of several robo-advisory platforms presenting a new challenge to the traditional financial advice channel, one of Canada’s largest independent brokerage firms is developing its own automated platform for its advisors to help them grow their businesses and serve a different client segment.

Toronto-based Richardson GMP Ltd. has begun working on a wealth-management tool that the firm’s advisors will be able to use to supplement their existing advisory services, said Andrew Marsh, the firm’s president and CEO, on Tuesday.

“What we’re working on is an automated solution — a tool to provide efficiency and technological productivity so that [advisors] will be able to continue to grow their scale of practice,” Marsh said.

Although Richardson GMP is only in the early stages of developing the platform — and thus few details are available — the tool will create a more automated way of managing client assets similar to a robo-advisory platform, Marsh said. The tool will be available only through Richardson GMP advisors and designed for use with the segment of an advisor’s clientele who have fewer assets and require less attention from the advisor.

“[It’s] for the smaller households that [advisors] want to keep a relationship with, but minimize how much work goes into it,” Marsh said.

Richardson GMP will continue to encourage advisors to focus their efforts on higher net-worth client households; however, Marsh said the new platform will provide an efficient way for advisors to establish and maintain relationships with clients who don’t yet meet that threshold.

“[We want to] provide a platform that best supports our advisors to go out and get more of those $500,000-plus households,” he said, “while also giving them a really high-quality service tool for those next-generation clients, or up-and-coming professionals.”

The platform, which Marsh expects to be launched in late 2015 or early 2016, comes as a growing number of robo-advisory platforms enter the wealth-management space, presenting investors with an automated alternative to seeking financial advice in person.

“This is the next transformative and disruptive technological change to the industry,” Marsh said.

Although this technology threatens to disrupt the wealth-management space considerably, Marsh said it also gives advisors an opportunity to distinguish themselves and the services they provide.

“Anything that disrupts the business and forces professionals to redefine what they do for their clients, and why it’s valuable, is only going to benefit the best in the industry — those who are already doing that well,” he said. “It will help our industry better define the value that we provide to clients.”