In wealth management, Millennial and Gen Z customers remain critically underserved. Those who are set to inherit wealth will be less likely than previous generations to feel affinity with their parents’ wealth managers, and those who are yet to accumulate wealth are not yet visible to the industry. Incumbent wealth providers face a growing risk of obsolescence because of their failure to innovate to win the hearts and minds of a disenfranchised market-in-waiting.
A sensible strategy is to engage and earn the trust of these people now, before they come into wealth, and thus be the obvious provider to service their growing assets when the time comes. But almost without exception, today’s providers are failing to connect with this audience.
There are understandable reasons for the inertia. Wealth management is a relationship-centric world, and relationship managers have always owned and jealously guarded the customer relationship. This entrenched culture is a difficult starting point to produce the sort of digital interaction model and nuanced data strategy needed to develop a next-generation customer experience. There’s also the problem of the business model – the ubiquitous percentage of assets under management (AUM) system, which provides no viable revenue opportunity from customers with low or no assets to invest, making it hard to justify serving the not-yet-wealthy in the short term.
But most wealth is inherited. Today’s youth are, therefore, key to the continuity of incumbent advice businesses. The mean average client age for traditional advice firms is 59 years old. According to the Advice Gap report, only 6% of people paying for advice are aged 18-24, and only 13% are aged 25-34. As wealth is passed onto future generations, it is essential that wealth managers adapt to plug this hole. This means running to catch up with their digital counterparts within the wider financial services industry.
Where should wealth management firms focus innovation on capturing these vital but overlooked segments? We see three key areas:
- Brand modernisation
- Experience design
- Hybrid interaction
Data is the key to engaging “Wealth-in-Waiting”. Cognizant, 2023
Brand modernisation - why should they trust you?
Wealth providers must be able to break down existing perceptions and debunk stereotypes to overcome issues of trust and literacy within the next-generation audience. According to a 2020 survey by My Pension Expert, 57% of people do not trust financial advisers, believing them to be more self-interested than service-oriented. There is clearly a gulf between advice providers and would-be consumers, leaving younger generations unable to envisage the potential value of financial advice and, therefore, not seeking it. If they do want help, their first port of call is friends, family, and the internet.
The shift towards accessible, digestible content proliferated online through social media represents a serious call to action. While most 18-25-year-olds will not be receiving their inheritance anytime soon, it makes sense to build a relationship and solve their early pain points in order to be well-positioned when wealth does arrive. This generation puts trust in different sources than their parents. The Advice Gap report found that, among those unwilling to pay for financial advice, 21% of 18-25-year-olds currently use social media as their main source of information. Statista estimated that a person in the UK spends on average four hours and 14 minutes per day on their mobile devices, an increase of 41% from 2019.
Among younger generations, trust based on brand heritage alone has largely disappeared. Instead, confidence is increasingly captured by brands that can understand and solve pain points while demonstrating the right values. The young care less about historical measures like performance and social proof, and more about things like:
- Experience; is my journey clear, simple, and intuitive?
- Tone of voice; do I understand everything? Do I feel understood and supported?
- Reliability; is the service accessible? Does the product work without breaking?
- Transparency; do I understand the service? Do I know what I am paying for and why?
- Values; is this company making the world better? Is it helping me to do so?
Wealth providers wishing to emanate trustworthiness and brand appeal for the younger generations should ask themselves whether their brand communicates competence and empathy in these areas.
What does this mean for the advice industry? As channel preferences change, it is imperative that the wealth industry finds ways to meet the incoming generation on the platforms where they spend time with solutions that are relevant and appealing to them. Neobanks are showing how financial service providers can embrace multi-channel and reap the rewards of trust and brand loyalty.
Experience design
Wealth managers hoping to capture the next generation need to go back to basics to ensure understanding the customer is at the heart of their business. Not as a one-off activity, but as a living process. Conducting regular user research, prototyping new ideas, and measuring usage data on digital products - these activities can reveal insights about an audience that shatter even the most thoughtfully crafted assumptions. They can also provide an incomparable opportunity to develop deep trust and brand affinity - vital for engaging with tomorrow’s investors who are currently invisible to the industry.
The ability to design an end-to-end, seamless, channel-agnostic customer experience will increasingly be the great differentiator for wealth managers to stand out from the competition. There is currently a disconnect between data and customer experience (CX) within traditional wealth management. While most agree on the importance of CX and the value of data, firms fail to bring the two together in meaningful ways. Data is still overwhelmingly associated with finance and compliance.
Quick wins exist for those willing to look for experience-enriching insights in the data they already hold. This data could have been collected at any point of the customer journey, from social listening during the pre-onboarding stage to transaction and spending analysis once onboarded. There is a clear opportunity to bridge the generation gap and secure future customers by offering personalised experiences that turn today’s spenders and debtors into tomorrow’s savers and investors.
Hybrid interaction
As digital technology and interfaces become more sophisticated, a greater portion of human guidance and advice will be taken on by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms. However, according to Accenture, with a completely in-person relationship and two-thirds - 68% - looking for a combination of digital and personal, it is clear that the demand for human-to-human interaction is going nowhere. The question is, what does the optimal balance of human and digital look like in the best-in-class advice journeys of the future?
Eventually, it will consist of a highly personalised digital experience with the customer's own banking and transaction data at its core. The digital experience will be complemented by a human adviser, but in a scalable way that uses human time efficiently and is likely augmented by AI and Machine Learning (ML). The digital and human components will interweave seamlessly in such a way as to create optimal trust, confidence and convenience for the customer. This balance will differ from person to person, existing as a flexible, modular, highly personalised service framework.
The stepping-stones to this utopia can be laid now; imagine a scalable digital financial adviser, powered by AI, available through WhatsApp, solving pain points relevant to a young cash-strapped audience under the banner of a prestigious wealth manager. These are the sorts of test-and-learn innovations that will incrementally lead to next-generation scalable service in wealth.
None of this will happen tomorrow. But changing customer demographics will eventually mean that the industry standard service offering of today’s wealth managers is no longer viable. Wealth managers should focus their efforts today on the three pillars above to ensure that they are well-positioned as the great wealth transfer gets underway.
Interested in reading the full report? You can read this edition of the UK WealthTech Landscape Report online here.
