As we edge towards the end of the year, as part of our ‘Looking Back’ on 2023 series, we wanted to highlight where we start every year at The Wealth Mosaic, our annual scene-setter report on the role of technology in wealth management. This year’s version, WealthTech 2023, as always, was aimed at identifying the key industry trends for the year and beyond. What should the industry be focusing on and why? The report featured 12 industry perspectives segmented into four sections: the overview, the client, the adviser, and the business.
Below we have provided a quick overview of the content focus from each section of WealthTech 2023.
Report at a glance
The client perspective
On the client side, contributions highlighted the importance of customer experience again (no surprises there!). The ability to attract and retain clients through leveraging technology remains key. That could be in terms of enhancing the experience and getting an increasing share of wallet, or it could be the role that technology plays in reducing the cost to serve. In particular, client experience in the context of the ‘Great Wealth Transfer’, where the recipients of wealth have a different set of expectations, was front of mind. These are clearly enduring themes for the industry and will remain at the heart of the industry’s development focus.
The adviser perspective
On the adviser side, the role of technology to support the adviser with better tooling to make their day-to-day roles more efficient, thus making them accessible to their clients, and more connected to broader business processes (products, research, content, planning, etc.), and their firm’s infrastructure were discussed. The use of new technologies around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being seen as a real opportunity to promote things like personalisation and offer granular insights for the benefit of all three pillars - the client, the adviser, and the business. The industry is at pains to further enable their most significant expense – front-office talent.
The business perspective
On the business side, the report highlighted the firm being able to correctly position itself to serve clients’ actual needs, as opposed to perceived needs. This was focused not only on the next generation but also in the context of evolving solutions in the market such as alternative asset classes. The growth in popularity of the family office also underpinned the generic customer-experience theme, with the expectation from clients to have a service tailored to their specific needs.
A big thank you to all the contributors to WealthTech 2023: Ian Woodhouse, then of Accenture; Geoffroy De Ridder from Lombard Odier; Benjamin Labrousse from Wealth Dynamix, Adam Toms from OpenFin; Tariq Khan from Objectway; Fahd Rachidy from ABAKA; Urs Bolt; Lucia Perchard, then of Apex Group; Shane Reid from Umlaut; and Tamara Kostova, from Velexa.
You can access the full WealthTech 2023 report here.
Thanks, as ever, to my colleagues: Mungo Hamlet, Alison Ebbage, Marc Bussell and Alex Gervas Fernandez. We’re looking forward to bringing you more in 2024. To see our report line-up for 2024, as well as our full offering, check out our Work with Us in 2024 catalogue.
Read our recent ‘A Year in Review’ article here.
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