Maintaing client relations is a crucial component of success in wealth management. It enables wealth management advisors to properly understand and serve their client’s needs, help them achieve their financial goals, and retain their business over the long-term. But the ways in which advisors engage with clients and help in managing client relations is changing.
As digital transformation accelerates and client expectations evolve, traditional approaches must be complemented with an enhanced digital experience.
Wealth management advisors can leverage these new opportunities to create more effective engagement models that help craft solutions tailored to each client’s unique needs, concerns and challenges.
A Changing Market
With digital transformation and shifting client expectations, advisors can struggle to provide customised and comprehensive investment advice based on a deep understanding of client needs. Clients expect advisors to act as true partners and co-create a relationship based on client inputs, rather than advisor assumptions and standardised solutions.
Irrespective of age or wealth, investors expect a combination of breadth of service offerings, expert and timely investment advice, and outstanding client service. But there have been significant shifts in recent years in terms of how clients expect to be served.
Clients increasingly expect digital engagement across onboarding, transaction and advice. Non-digital interaction, through in-person meetings and phone calls, is increasingly complemented, and even replaced, by online engagement using mobile apps, websites, social channels and virtual conferencing.
These changes mean wealth management advisors need to create a client experience based on how investors want to engage, when they want to engage and what channel they prefer to use. They need to nurture the client relationship to ensure collaboration and a mutual understanding of the investor’s needs and goals.
This provides an opportunity for advisors to deploy a hybrid of in-person and digital engagement to create strong relationships, foster client confidence and trust, and deliver personalised, high-touch service.
In this new landscape, wealth managers can leverage multiple technology and data resources to build and strengthen client relationships and deliver enhanced service.
Technology, Data and Service
Digital technology solutions must be deployed and integrated at every stage of the client lifecycle. From the first touch point of the relationship, technology can be used to create a seamless and productive client journey that spans onboarding, account management, analysis, trade and investment mandates, and reporting.
For onboarding, digital solutions can offer configurable, collaborative workflows that provide automated AML, KYC and identity verification, secure document repository and simplified, streamlined client-facing functionality such as auto filled onboarding forms.
Digital solutions are also crucial to deliver robust account management and world-class investor portals and apps, including mobile apps, consolidated reporting, data privacy security, direct order placement, and digital signature, approval and notification functionality. Enhanced transparency and access to performance information can significantly boost trust in maintaining client relations over time.
For client lifecycle management, advisors can deploy technology that supports periodic automated and ad hoc reviews, prospect management and investment proposals, as well as customer relationship management (CRM) functionality.
Delivering Actionable Insights
To build or strengthen client relations, wealth managers can leverage technology to more effectively uncover, understand and act on their client’s long-term goals and purpose for investing.
From initial engagement, onboarding and beyond, a plethora of data must be captured, managed, analysed and interpreted to drive data-driven insights and relevance.
Technology can be leveraged to eliminate data silos, organise client data into a unified system, and ensure that information is managed in a connected way across systems and processes.
This is a key enabler of data analytics. It ensures that meaningful value is extracted from data to generate a complete and holistic picture of client needs. It enables insights about the dynamics of their behaviour, whether that be routine beneficiary changes, shifting attitudes to risk or evolving life goals.
These actionable insights can help wealth management advisors take quick, appropriate and timely action to foster trusted relationships and provide the best service and advice possible. To deliver outstanding client engagement, advisors must consistently strengthen trust and mutual understanding within the relationship and act on insights and feedback to deliver expert advice and continuous improvements in service.
Multiple colleagues who are not co-located can work on a single platform to deliver exceptional client service while maintaining efficiency and scalability.
Competitive Edge
Another reason to deploy digital solutions is to gain market intelligence through client engagement. This can help wealth management advisors identify the other disruptive apps that clients are using, learn more about them, and apply that intelligence to improve their propositions, service and operations. This presents a key source of competitive advantage to wealth management firms in a highly dynamic, complex and competitive market.
Digital advances and changing client expectations are re-shaping the wealth management industry. The most successful advisors are those who select, implement and manage advanced technology to drive excellence in client engagement.
About Valuefy
Valuefy is a premier investment technology lab with cutting-edge solutions serving leading financial institutions across the globe. Its Wealth Management Solutions has enabled Wealth Managers globally by providing production-grade investment technology solutions for an uberized customer experience.