1. To what extent and how do wealth managers use technology to engage their clients (and prospects) with ideas and content today?
Research indicates that over half (54%) of wealth managers rate the way they personalise investment commentaries as poor to average. And less than a fifth customise them to the highest degree. It’s not surprising that only just above half - 53% - of clients say their wealth managers’ communications are personally relevant. Even fewer feel that they are engaging and actionable([1]).

We work a lot with Tier 1 wealth managers and private banks to focus on two elements – the advisory content and the digitally-enhanced process of supporting that advice. What we see is that there is relatively well-advanced digitisation of the advisory process to generate investment proposals. But in itself that is not enough and what we are adding into the advisory processes are data science and cognitive technology. These contribute to ‘digital empathy’ – technology enabled ability to understand and very clearly reflect client interests, preferences and aspirations in the ideas and content that are curated for them automatically, based on deep client profiling.

2. Looking across the sector, is there a willingness from wealth managers to use more technology tools to enhance how they engage their clients (and prospects) with ideas and content? Has Covid-19 pushed this up the agenda?
The pandemic has driven up demand from clients to digitally engage with advisers, in contrast to the pre-COVID period, when self-directed and self-serviced investing (with an emphasis on ETFs) gained traction. Post-COVID, many people have decided to take professional advice for the first time. Even highly experienced clients are relying on their advisers like never before. So yes, the situation has very much pushed client engagement up the agenda.

Interestingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, unsatisfactory service experience is the biggest factor (87%) influencing wealthy clients to change provider and it is thought poor communication is four times likelier to end relationships than poor asset performance. Post-pandemic, ideas and content are a crucial element of relationship growth and retention with clients.

Globally, research confirms that clients have a strong need to be understood and inspired by their wealth managers and advisers. This is most prominent in three key areas:

• Provide content that is personalised to my interests and goals.
• Stay abreast of my needs and inspire me.
• Evaluate my data on an ongoing basis.

Clients themselves are not against technology in principle. When you're looking at private banking clients, for example, the affinity of users with technology is not an issue; the question rather is to what extent they will accept and be willing to receive advice digitally. 

Sharing ideas and content with clients is about more than being ‘on transmit’. There should be a true mutual, collaborative element: co-creation of favourable outcomes, for the client and the institution. Co-creation is a form of collaborative innovation where businesses have a creative relationship with clients. In co-creation in wealth management, ideas will be shared – and honed – among advisers and investors, but also throughout the business, to create new value across portfolios, products and services.

The issue is not so much ‘unwillingness’ on the part of advisers to use more technology tools. It’s more a question of whether those tools are available within their institution. One key issue is that wealth managers’ CRM and CLM implementation maturity varies widely. Only 25% of firms have a fully integrated system, covering the entire client lifecycle including engagement through ideas and content.

3. What are the technologies and tools available to wealth managers to support and enhance how they engage their clients and prospects with ideas and content?
The great challenge technology can help overcome is to supplement hard pressed human bandwidth. It does this by automating the processes involved ‘behind the scenes’ when it comes to engaging with ideas and content. Without technology support, advisers cannot hope to do the amount of work needed to personalise content for all of their clients. And the costs of expanding adviser teams would be prohibitive and would lead to unrealistic fee levels.

InvestCloud’s Digital Wealth platform is a total solution for wealth managers and private banks. Whether they’re looking to enhance sales effectiveness, improve client experience or offload time-consuming functions such as research personalisation, portfolio construction, rebalancing, performance measurement and client reporting, InvestCloud’s Digital Wealth platform is unsurpassed.

4. How can a wealth management start to use and/or better use technologies and tools to support and enhance how they engage their clients and prospects with ideas and content?
Stepping back to give a real-world analogy, everybody is used to watching a movie on-demand, ordering food on their phones, streaming music on-demand, all this on the basis of recommendations and nudges that they receive on their phone or on their preferred channels, related to how they previously interacted and consumed that service. They now want the same experience from their wealth advisers, and we believe that is true across the entire wealth spectrum. 

Any wealth manager, from the smallest to the largest in the world, can use InvestCloud’s Digital Wealth platform, all while providing first-class, differentiated and empathetic experiences to their clients and their employees

5. What does the future look like? There are technologies and tools available now to support this area but how will those develop to further support wealth managers in engaging with their clients (and prospects) with ideas and content in the future?
We see four key areas where digital solutions can support. The first one is providing relevant advice.  So, there are a variety of tools that support this process and give advisers the ability to take a truly holistic view of the client, and that in turn means providing to the institution the ability to aggregate the client's financial situation and data across multiple, from core systems to books of records, CRM, risk management systems and so forth.

The second key area centers on the personalisation of advice. That is all about data mining capabilities, using AI and machine learning engines to generate insights, analytics, in short, recommendations that are personalised, if not hyper-personalised. Next-best action engines encompass exactly those capabilities; they are a great example of AI and machine learning algorithms that analyse client behaviours and capture their preferences in order to show recommendations that are hyper-personalised.

A third area where advisers can be supported with digital tools is in how advice is delivered. For this delivery of advice, whether it's through client channels, or whether it is through hybrid channels with digital collaboration tools, you need to keep the client always engaged and informed with personalised content, with portfolio analysis, collaborative and secure channels that engage interaction. This aspect is very important to enable advisers to provide value to clients (and ensure that clients recognize the value).

And last but not least, you must also keep the advice compliant, and that's top of mind of every client that we talk to. This is essential in the regulatory world we inhabit - everything that the wealth manager does needs to be compliant, recorded, auditable, and that's something we're very mindful of, and we always factor into our solutions.

To find out more, please visit www.investcloud.com.