We are pleased to announce the release of our summary paper for WealthTech Matters – The Adviser, brought to you in collaboration with Owen James. This year’s event was held at the Royal College of Physicians, London brought together COOs, CTOs, and CIOs from top wealth managers to scope key business challenges and the impact that technology can have in their resolution.
The event was supported by a scene-setter questionnaire that was designed to provide a finger on the pulse of what the community is thinking, including how it is feeling about the year ahead, the areas that are the biggest concerns, cost reduction ambitions and the barriers to productivity.
We then summarised the key findings raised at each panel session and summarised the discussion.
The session ‘Choice matters - enabling advisers by measuring impact’, led by Alex Whitson, Managing Director at VouchedFor, discussed the importance of defining and measuring the value that advisers provide, and how firms can use Consumer Duty as a rail to provide value to clients.
Feeding into that, the roundtable ‘Cost and benefits – leveraging technology to transform client-adviser communications’, led by Luc Haldimann, Co-Founder and CEO of Unblu looked at changes in this area. The session discussed the importance of choice in communications channels and their importance as a part of the overall adviser-client offering.
Next, Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) - putting this at the heart of the business and the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, led by Alessandro Tonchia, Head of Strategy at InvestCloud Europe and Asia, looked at digital tools to gather and triangulate data with the result being improved service throughout the client lifecycle.
Related to the client experience is the need to meet the expectations of the next generation. This was tackled in the ‘Growth mindset – keeping up with the pace of change’ roundtable, led by Alistair Venables, UK Lead at additiv. Here, respondents looked at how to prepare for the needs and expectations of the next generation of wealth holders, while also responding to today’s priorities – and balancing the two.
As well as the themes surrounding customer experience, practical solutions to provide efficiency, such as implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), were also discussed. The roundtable ‘Efficiency generation – how can technology make advisers more efficient?’, led by Chris Thorne, Senior Solution Consultant at SS&C Blue Prism, looked at the role of RPA and the importance of defining the optimal end result and then breaking down all the components of an end-to-end process and applying automation.
Finally, the ‘Digital space – adapting to evolving assets’ session, led by Bruce Keith, CEO of Bridgeweave, looked at understanding the component parts of digital assets, how they work together, and for what purpose. This area is not yet well understood or accepted - an 85% drop in the value of crypto in the recent past has not helped! There is also a need for more regulatory clarity so that wealth managers and platforms are clear on what they are dealing with.
This research is part of The Wealth Mosaic’s collaboration with Owen James. It is widely accepted that wealth management and private banking will be the most disrupted financial sector over the next five years. As financial institutions look to digitise their proposition to drive greater productivity and UX/CX through the business, we have put together a collection of services to help drive presence, awareness, and engagement into this particular channel.
