1.1. Current status & challenges
It is an ongoing challenge for wealth management firms to efficiently utilise technology to provide the best possible services for both the adviser and the customer. There is a huge amount of information known to firms about customers’ lives, attitudes, preferences etc., but providing the adviser with the tools to act upon it efficiently, and digitising the appropriate elements of the solution, are still proving difficult.

We at aixigo summarise the main challenges as follows:

• Advisers are still undertaking far too much manual work, which is very inefficient and leaves insufficient time for value-adding services to the customer. The use of multiple systems and paperbased process leads to high error rates, and limited availability of management information prevents the adviser and the firm from gaining sufficient insight into the customers’ needs.
• Customers experience major ups and downs during both the accumulation and decumulation phases, but technology is not being sufficiently utilised to help advisers to identify and anticipate these changes and advise the customer accordingly.
• There is a surge in the number of people seeking advice from their mid-40s and approximately every 10 years thereafter, but the advice experience is not being adapted to reflect the communication preferences of different generations.
• More and more people are in need of advice, and the ability to accurately profile and segment them is increasing, but firms are typically still offering investment solutions based purely on their risk profile. Furthermore, it is proving difficult to serve ‘retail’ clients efficiently and profitably.
• Customers now expect highly individualised wealth management services because they are so used to receiving such service in other areas of their digital life.

1.2. Impetus to change & potential benefits
At aixigo we firmly believe that technology can meet all of these complex challenges to provide the best individualised advice possible to every customer, whilst still allowing both the firm and the adviser to operate in an efficient and profitable manner. Some current areas of focus with our clients, from the perspective of the customer and the adviser, are as follows:

• Providing personalised, targeted products and services to every customer, including customised investment products and reporting across multiple channels and formats, and even with the way the adviser interacts with them.
• Working to drastically increase adviser efficiency across the whole workflow, allowing them to spend considerably more time providing value-adding services to the customer and allowing them to serve more customers efficiently

We work on these areas by implementing a holistic strategy that incorporates:

Digitisation: Adapting manual processes to function automatically, whilst being regulation-compliant and cost-effective.

Digital Product Development: Creating products and services that provide an individualised and inspiring customer experience.

Hyper-Personalisation: the use of data and information to provide more personalised and targeted products, services and content.

The goal of combining the above is to provide efficiency and profitability for the adviser and the firm, and a highly individualised, habit forming and sticky experience for the customer.

1.3. Opportunities & actions
Utilising technology for digitisation and digital product development will not only provide tremendous opportunities to wealth managers; it will ensure their survival in the digital world of the future. Examples that can deliver immediate, tangible results are as follows:

Digital product development: Combining existing investment portfolios with a range of optional alternatives, such as themes (ESG, tech stocks, commodities etc.) or simply the ability to substitute existing elements with suitable, pre-approved alternative funds or stocks to provide truly individualised portfolios for customers.

Digitisation: if the Portfolios are personalised in this manner, the reporting should be too. By automating the creation of documents and generating them in a much shorter timeframe, there is again much more time for value-adding activities by the adviser (that themselves are highly personalised).

Both allow for a much more efficient advice process, and customers will benefit from transparent, personalised services that encourage trust and loyalty over the long term.

We also find that this makes portfolio management more flexible for any business model, and for the transition of customers from one to another as their situation changes. It becomes possible to serve a much higher number of mandates and relieve pressure on margins, and it becomes economically viable for wealth managers to provide services to the retail sector with much lower investment volumes per mandate.

Personalised, automated reporting leads to reduced errors, less time needed for compliance checks and lower costs, directly freeing up adviser time. The efficiency gains that can be seen across onboarding, aggregation of customer information and compliance checking means more time for the customer and for the adviser to be able to efficiently serve more customers. And again, customers will receive a much better experience, directly based on their personal requirements and preferences.

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This article was originally part of The Wealth Mosaic's WealthTech Views Client Engagement Report. You can access and download the full report here: 
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