It has been a few years since digital transformation appeared on the priority list of financial industry executives. While the evolutionary process of tapping into the latest technology is continuous, the pandemic has accelerated it dramatically. Even the most conservative branches, such as wealth management, now contemplate transforming their businesses into more digitalised operations. Some financial advisers embrace innovation wholeheartedly, reaping all the benefits and facing all the risks of early adoption, while others take a more cautious strategy. OutRank® advocates an incremental, forecast-driven approach when building digital journeys for your customers or financial planners, regardless of where your competitors are in their digital transformation efforts.
Evaluating and discussing forecasts is one of the most useful and engaging elements of the financial planning experience. Your customers want to know when they can achieve their financial goals and how their investment choices would impact the pattern and timeline of their savings.
At Kidbrooke®, we provide Forecast, the module of OutRank®, which delivers predictive forecasting functionality applicable to various financial planning use cases and digital journey elements. Forecast leverages our scenario-based approach to predict the future movements of global financial markets while reflecting your institution’s house-views and risk factor universe. The model powering Forecast allows you to accurately reflect the effects of automatic rebalancing, and tax deduction and generally achieve a more accurate stochastic modelling of an institution's product universe. What is more, using Forecast does not mean diverging from your unique methodology and judgement on how the economies develop but instead improves the efficiency and quality of your current workflows and the resulting service.
Where do you start? You start where you are. Forecast is an API that is flexible enough to support you at any stage of your digital transformation journey. Whether you are beginning by complementing your website with interactive graphs or updating your existing customer platform with new features, you are sure to add value with Forecast. Due to its unique balance sheet approach, Forecast supports any use case that requires cash flow modelling, including pensions, mortgages, financial planning and investment management.
Let us examine a few stages of digitally empowered customer journeys and how Forecast could help with each one.
Start The Conversation
Your website is one of your essential marketing channels. Your future customers are likely to thoroughly read through your website to evaluate the experience and expertise of your firm. Using Forecast, you can empower widgets and interactive graphs that would illustrate how your customer could benefit from using your services over time. At this point, you do not have to collect any information on a customer, just let potential customers play around with simple factors such as risk level, the current capital and future cash flows. In case of planning use cases add their age and earnings and base the rest on average population data available in OutRank® to minimise user input at this stage. For example, the graph fuelled by simulations could show when customers of a similar age and profile could achieve their financial goals if they choose to engage with you. This step aims to entice the customer to start a conversation; whether by contacting you or logging in and continuing their digital journey.
Keep The Customer Engaged
Whether your business relies on financial advisers guiding your customers through their financial lives, user-friendly self-service interfaces helping them understand their savings perspectives or a combination thereof, forecasting applications are essential to lead productive dialogues with your customers. Forecast can help your customers visualise and navigate the uncertainty of their financial decision-making, powering a wide range of adviser tools or becoming a core part of your self-service financial journeys. Forecast equips your financial advisers with an ability to answer their customers' questions on the fly by accurate modelling of various strategies and scenarios. If you built an entirely digitalised offering, Forecast could help customers decide which of your investment or debt products suit their goals and aspirations best, while fully reflecting your institutions' house views and brand identity. This is a crucial stage for communicating the value of your advisory services to the customer in a transparent, accurate and comprehensive manner.
Deliver a Reliable, High-Quality Service
When customers trust your institution with their savings and investments, it is important to ensure that forecasts driving your financial decision-making are consistent with customers' expectations as well as reliable, granular, fast, and auditable. Our Forecast API allows for a level of granularity that fits your business model. For example, in a pension context, such a forecast's components could include national state pension benefits; any occupational pension benefits driven by probably salary developments and private savings that would fund a person's pension income. Besides, being amplified by the cloud, Forecast can evaluate thousands of realistic scenarios per second contributing to swift and seamless customer experiences. Finally, Forecast is configured for transparency and flexibility, allowing you to trace and tailor the decision-making down to the most fundamental assumptions.
Monitor and Evaluate
When the conversation is finished, the transactions are executed and the customer goes about their day, the financial planners, both digital and hybrid, need to stay informed and keep their clients updated about the significant milestones of their financial journeys. Our forecasting software can provide your customers with realistic, timely outlooks about their current situation, allowing for managing expectations, timely actions, and ongoing dialogue with the client. Forecast can deliver interactive graphs explaining where the customer is in their journey and how the next best action would impact their wealth over time. You can provide this information via a financial planner or a notification in a customer portal – whatever suits your approach best.
It is fair to say that despite its conservatism, the wealth management sector has caught up with e-commerce and entertainment industries in recognising the importance of forecasting capabilities. While artificial intelligence revolutionises search and suggestion mechanisms at Netflix and Amazon, financial industry players realise that forecasting peoples' financial futures gradually becomes key to defining the customer experience. Improving your forecasting capabilities can improve speed, accuracy and reliability, making your services more interactive and bringing your communication with the customer to the next level.
Reach out to our team today to book a demo and find out how Forecast can improve your current digital, physical or hybrid wealth business regardless of if you target the HNWIs, the mass affluent or the retail customers of this world.
