Recent global events with the pandemic and interest rates have underscored the need for excellent client communication in wealth management. Part of this is the pressure of not being able to meet live as much or at all, as well as the need to guide clients through difficult times. In addition, a changing demographic of client wealth is forcing wealth managers and private banks to look at the delivery of services and advice in multiple different ways – so that they are more empathetic and personalised. Client and adviser portals are seen as one important way to address this client communication need, as well as do so in an operationally efficient way.
1. For an improved client service to address a wider demographic mix of investor and other pressures faced by wealth managers, what is the role of the client and adviser portal?
One issue the pandemic has clearly highlighted is the way wealth managers of all types engage with their clients. Gone are the days of in-person meetings, and of wining and dining (although these might be returning, slowly). The channels and digital tools advisers, bankers and relationship managers can access to engage with their clients are very different now, for good reasons. Clients today also expect to receive tailored advice – and to have access to personalised services – as and when they need it. They want market intelligence and investment advice to be relevant to them, to be insightful and to be actionable.
This applies to existing clients – wealth managers need to work hard to keep them – and to the prospective new clients they are competing for. In this context of tough competition to retain and grow clients, the client portal has a key role to play as a point of client entry to services and advice, and ideally of delight. It provides a critical initial digital touchpoint with clients that defines the digital relationship. It can be configured to meet the varying needs of different demographics and different risk or investment appetites. The client and adviser portals – and their interaction – act as a critically important channel for a wealth manager to provide outstanding experience, all the way across the client lifecycle.
2. For those firms deploying this type of technology, what are the biggest challenges in making sure it aligns with client expectations, design, process, existing technologies and digital channels?
Many client portals on the market aren’t well designed or intuitive – and the same can be said of many adviser experiences. And regardless, they are almost always the same, such that two different wealth managers who use the same client portal from the same vendor will – possibly with the exception of a logo swap and maybe a colour change – look the same. That’s very unappealing for firms that pride themselves on the personalised nature of their services to clients. Not to mention, clients themselves have high (and growing) expectations, and part of those expectations is having a client portal experience that delivers personalised communication, planning and other services that are empathetic – digitally empathetic. They are also increasingly sophisticated, and they want a great experience at every touchpoint with their adviser.
Therefore, wealth managers need to ensure they partner with a firm that not only has the right functional offerings but, as importantly, which is design led, understands and applies behavioural science, and can bring differentiated digital experiences to life for client and adviser portals alike, quickly and efficiently. Firms that rely on hard-coding simply can’t deliver this.
In addition, one of the biggest challenges for many wealth managers continues to be integration of new technology with pre-existing legacy systems. This isn’t as simple as bolting something on, although in many cases that is the approach taken. While the digital experience is crucial, data is also key. Wealth managers should partner with a firm with demonstrated excellence in data integration – and a technology stack that clearly supports it.
3. How does a system like this capture the relevant data and analyse it, put that into context and present to the adviser in order for them to provide a more personalised service to their clients?
For a client portal to be effective both for RM and client, it needs to allow for a high degree of personalisation. This ensures all information and intelligence presented to the client is always personally relevant. This is in strong and positive contrast to the ineffective, and undesirable, one-size-fits-all approach. The portal needs to drive the strong emotional connection with the client that, historically, would usually have been developed through face-to-face meetings. These days, however, brand loyalty and client trust are being built across wires, not through handshakes over a dinner table.
A great portal matches user appeal with client-specific relevance to create a standout experience. It will integrate Machine Learning and AI to support delivery and presentation of personalised advice and recommendations (leveraging solutions such as next best actions). From a client perspective, very little is more damaging to their relationship with their wealth manager than receiving information that has no bearing on their financial situation and aspirations. Perhaps the only thing that’s worse is great information and advice that arrives too late to take any meaningful action.
4. There is also the developing theme in the market of hybrid advice. How does a client and adviser portal support the need for hybrid advice and combine both the human and digital elements of the client lifecycle?
Many wealth managers work across the spectrum of wealth and age of clients – let alone crossing other demographic boundaries. So, in order to truly serve the full wealth spectrum, wealth managers need to be able to deliver human-driven advice when clients need it, fully digital advice when clients prefer it, as well as hybrid solutions that touch on both.
Client and adviser portals can support modular and hybrid advice by bringing the best of automation (for example, extremely powerful planning engines) together with the best of client communication (e.g., intuitive digital experience, chat, secure messaging, portfolio-related news, etc.). And clients and advisers need to have optionality in how they communicate through these portals. The best ones integrate these multiple personas seamlessly. And they should integrate with pre-client portal functionality, allowing prospects to be engaged early in the client lifecycle.
The bottom line is this: both styles of advice need to work hand in hand to be effective. Information related to digital and personal advice needs to be cross-referenced, matching up at all times to provide a coordinated experience across the whole lifecycle. Wealth managers that get this right will drive down costs and drive up share of wallet and client loyalty, all while they reduce the time and energy spent by advisers on administrative tasks. If, for example, provision of relevant research to be presented to clients can be automated, this frees up significant time for other, potentially more value-adding, activities.
5. What about the CRM? How does a client and adviser portal integrate with a CRM in terms of data capture and reuse and how tightly linked do these and other systems need to be?
It is about CRM, but not only. Many wealth managers are still using CRMs that purport to be client lifecycle management solutions, but are really just point CRM solutions. What this means is that they leave out broad swaths of client communication and planning that wealth managers crucially need. Whether it’s gaps in prospecting, onboarding, risk profiling, suitability or reporting, missing key elements means that the wealth manager’s service cannot be joined up and holistic. And even withing CRMs, you see a lot of them with multiple ways to enter the same client data, which is inefficient, or even those allowing multiple ways of ‘unique’ client IDs.
If portals and client lifecycle management solutions (including CRM) are effectively joined up, and partnered with a rewarding client experience, they will support each other.
