The wealth management landscape is ever-evolving and wealth management firms of today are increasingly adopting cutting edge technology to cater to tech-savvy millennials. The expectations and preferences of today’s clientele such as increased insights, automation, and 24X7 customer service can only be met by leveraging smart tech.
Investment managers of today are investing in wealth management platforms with AI-enabled advisory and predictive analytics to cater to these demands. The latest report by BCG on the wealth management landscape stated that 75% of wealth management firms are investing heavily in big data and analytics to meet evolving customer demands.
One of the major innovations in the space in the last decade is predictive analytics, which basically means the use of historical data to determine and predict the relationships between different variables in the wealth management process. Predictive analytics helps build models and processes that optimize the wealth management process, introduce high automation, and predict asset failure.
Predictive analytics is a space that is seeing huge growth in the market due to the value they provide to wealth managers in terms of cost savings and process efficiency. Using predictive analytics at different stages of the customer funnel is helping wealth management firms keep pace and deliver the coveted ‘high touch’ experience that clients have come to expect.
Here’s how predictive analytics is transforming the wealth management space:
Aligning business strategy
Predictive analytics helps wealth management firms anticipate investor demand, life events, attrition, investment patterns and more. This can help firms align their business and their product offerings according to this data to limit attrition and improve investor retention. It also helps firms understand investors with the highest risk of leaving and the highest lifetime value, so the managers can take appropriate action and effort to minimize the risk to AUM.
Data-driven intelligence
Robo advisory is being offered as part of the wealth management services which recommends portfolios for each financial goal by blending Robo capabilities with human intelligence. This automation helps in streamlining the process for wealth managers by eliminating redundant tasks.
Smarter client acquisition
Predictive analytics enables wealth management firms to customize their products and offer more targeted services to their clients. It enables them to recognize HNI clients and create custom investment opportunities for them. It also helps drive customized, personalized. and intelligent customer communications. From email communications, sales calls or message communications, analytics helps personalize them to offer a seamless experience leading to higher client acquisitions.
Exceptional customer service
Predictive analytics helps wealth managers give customers contextual advice. It helps wealth managers predict customer needs and approaches them with the right solution at the right time. Big data can be used to mine customer behavior through surveys, market patterns, risk levels and more to help provide tailored advice that customers appreciate. It also helps wealth managers make real-time recommendations, investment ideas, and financial plans in minutes, instead of hours.
Helps the research process
Predictive analytics and NLP can help asset managers make sense of vast unstructured and structured data sets. It can help managers understand patterns and trends in the data and make smarter decisions based on this research. This helps asset managers save on hours of time that they would have spent parsing through the data.
Higher visibility into operations and reduced costs
Digitized wealth management platform will help wealth management firms optimize processes and reduce back-office costs through better human capital management (optimizing hiring process), optimal demand management (optimizing effort based on customer lifetime value), and reduce due diligence costs through next-generation digitized KYC. These optimizations will help keep firms competitive and help the bottom line in this cut-throat market.
What does the future look like?
As wealth management platforms grow more and more sophisticated, the high investment in AI-based models means that they will become even more accurate. This means that investors can expect more personalized and better service from their advisors. Wealth management firms will be able to leverage these insights to create better opportunities and drive superior performance for investors. Firms that fail to leverage analytics will underperform and eventually will not be able to keep up with their tech-savvy competitors. However, those who do invest heavily in AI at this stage will capture a lion’s share of the millennial investor base.