1.1. Current status & challenges
With COVID-19, wealth managers are facing new challenges from distributed remote operations, intense competition for clients, and dealing with heightened information overload.

Clients want a personalized experience, but how do you offer this when there are so many clients to cover with diverse financial goals, investment and personal interests and perspectives?

As the ‘new normal’ emerges, digital engagement has jumped by 7-10x according to Oliver Wyman. Clients are being bombarded with information and demand for their attention. What will make you stand out? How do you do this for all of your clients?

Current hurdles to providing personalized, high-quality client engagement at scale:

• Understanding Clients – huge increase in volume of client interactions, demand on advisor attention makes it challenging to stay on top of changing client interests.
• Awareness across Data Silos – analyzing CRM, financial goals, portfolios in different systems for so many clients is manual and time-consuming and important client signals may be missed.
• Context is dynamic and never-ending – with such a dynamic world, each client interaction requires a new data “snapshot”, fresh insights and added value thought leadership to stay ahead of the competition and prevent client churn.

Advisors should not have to feel constantly underwater in the race for digital leadership. Advanced technology brings the power of parallel computing, machine analysis, sorting and organization of data to reduce and eliminate these barriers.

1.2. Impetus to change & potential benefits
The race for digital leadership combined with the pandemic has highlighted why wealth managers must act now to increase the use of technology.

According to Roubini ThoughtLab, those considering action should take note of how digital leaders are embracing the top use cases for AI in Wealth Management:

• Increasing advisor productivity, finding and attracting investors and improving predictive analytics are crucial use cases which average 40- 50% adoption by leaders currently increasing to 60% in the next 2 years
• This compares to general adoption across all firms of about 10% rising to 20% in the next 2 years.

Those that do take action, improving AI and analytics adoption can lead to significant benefits that directly affect the bottom line:

• Digitally advanced firms benefit from an 8.6% revenue increase, 11.3% increase in advisor productivity, 6.7% increase in AUM and 6.3% increase in market share.
• For those that fall behind, there is a “laggard penalty” – the gap in absolute dollar terms between leaders and those late to the game works out to $79.2m per $1bn in revenue.
• For broker-dealers this penalty is even higher – as much as 14% of firm revenue and the trust and engagement of the digitally savvy next generation.

1.3. Opportunity & actions
Wealth managers can now look forward to an AI optimized workflow where each aspect of their day is enhanced. Over a cup of coffee in the morning, an advisor can get instant client understanding from CRM with ForwardLane as to who to contact first through priority scoring of clients. They can see indications as to which clients most require attention with data-driven reasons why. With daily summarized “Client Signals” for each client gleaned from diverse data systems, advisors drastically reduce time spent in searching for and analyzing data, freeing up capacity for new business generation. Signals can come from reading CRM Notes, surfacing Goals discussed with ForwardLane’s GoalMinerTM patent-pending financial NLP technology, from significant portfolio movements, and goal tracking and attainment.

By linking unstructured and structed data, Forwardlane is cross-checking what has been discussed in CRM, with actual actions taken in portfolio and goals-based systems. Together “Signal Collections” provide client retention and growth signals that provide awareness across all clients every day, by scanning and detecting important changes in data and related discussions in CRM to follow-up and engage with. ForwardLane makes it easy to share these insights through workflow integrations with one-click to save to CRM notes, log a call or share via email. Using ForwardLane’s predictive analytics powered by machine-learning and real world user feedback, advisors get recommendations from ForwardLane as to what to engage with clients about and trusted “next-best actions” to maintain consistency.

According to McKinsey, opportunities abound for firms that deploy new technologies. At ForwardLane we are focused on the following use cases:

• Expand sales & growth from priority clients by up to 35% - optimize digital advisory with targeted messaging for client segments, data-driven insights and timely engagement.
• Free up existing sales & advisor capacity by up to 15% - automate and reduce daily data analysis, improve sales efficiency and time-to-insight
• Improve sales & advisor productivity by up to 10x with precision targeting - with algorithms that automatically identify growth and retention opportunities from activating your existing data.

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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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