“COVID-19 may have turned the world upside down but from a technological sense it has had a valuable role of accelerator for many trends that were already becoming established. It has proven them and brought them into the realm of the culturally acceptable and desirable,” states Murphy. Going forward he thinks that when looking at it from a wide strategic technological approach the need is not just to look at serving the end client at the front end but also how best to meet the needs of internal clients- so as to feed into the overall service at the front end.

“For clients, the strategy has to be how to harness a digital-first approach that adds value- they want a solution that is fully compliant and compatible with their day to day needs and provides ease of use. It also needs to be an approach that is personalised in terms of the range of channels available,” says Murphy.

For the employee, he thinks the idea is to give them the tools to do their jobs much better. “For wealth planners and investment managers, the plan is to give them the quality data that gives them the strategic confidence to go ahead and use it to allow for better insight, allocation and planning.”

This in turn has a better effect for the client as the service and the quality of the advice and allocation is enhanced.

He contextualises the journey which, he says, began around 20 years ago when employees would be given a specific technology to do a specific task. “Now we have evolved to how to best engineer technology to give an overall better offering to our clients thought processes and in terms of what we can deliver better but for less,” he says.

Client demand
Indeed, when it comes to the way in which clients interact with their advisers then this has changed massively. “Even two years ago using text was inconceivable and this has been a continuous road to reach the point where if the communication method exists then it is being used.”

But technology will never replace one to one human contact. But it does, however, solve an immediate issue that frees up the human contact. Good examples of this are email validation rather than using the post or even meeting. The change from wet signature to e-signatures too has been another stand out change; even a year ago deeds and wills needed to be physically witnessed but the law has been changed to adapt to the new possibility and the new reality.

But being able to make the most of this relies on clients and staff alike having these tools. “It is making sense to give both staff and clients alike the same tools to use – applying the right permissions and securities obviously. The idea is to have a digital portal that is used by the whole business in terms of system design and maintenance, as well as giving the very best service levels and capabilities both in house and to clients.”

He explains that the crux of this is having the means to share information and data. “The industry is moving towards a model where correct and high-quality data is key to business success. This is not just in terms of hard data that can be analysed, it also applies to soft contextual and behavioural data such as client meeting notes, the technology now exists to mine such data and gain usable insight from it. This data mining is all about better understanding the client and being able to anticipate interests and needs – it’s the modern-day survey used to identify trends and then apply personalisation to individual clients,” he says.

The right technology is also important when it comes to talent recruitment, he thinks. “We increasingly see applicants ask about the technology stack because without the right tools and systems they are unable to leverage technology to the same extent and in today’s world it really does make a difference,” he says.

The right technology
None of this could have been done without the right technology, however, and Murphy points to the direct and tangible impact of technology on a business. Describing it as, ‘the foundation of support and provider of continuity and resilience’. “The move is just 20 years from a single PC to a network to a cloud-enabled hosted environment with API enabled links which is really remarkable,” he notes.

But how well does the technology marketplace of today really meet the needs of the wealth management industry and are the right solutions that solve actual real-world problems being brought to market?

Here he feels that the market is proving itself to be internally efficient in terms of being able to provide SaaS and easy to integrate solutions that have speedy and efficient lead times. “Technology has become much more efficient and accessible and the entire lift outs of yesterday now seem pretty unthinkable and unnecessary. The trend is very much towards having a common toolset and appearance so that the different vendors can easily integrate with each other for the good of their end clients,” he says.

He also points to the role that the FinTechs have played in making the seemingly impossible possible and in bringing greater agility in terms of attitude and actual technology to the fore. “In London, we have so many FinTechs and they really have brought an edge to our sector in terms of identifying unique opportunities and plugging holes where there is a great need for a technological solution. They have brought agility and flexibility to the technological landscape and brought about the ability for the wealth management sector to have an agile responsive ecosystem whilst staying compliant and secure,” he says.

In particular, he identifies robotics as a general theme that will come to the fore as an enabler of automation, and areas like onboarding and AML/ KYC in particular will see great advances being made. In addition, he says, other granular processes that are currently expensive will become less so once they are made more scalable. Data management, for example, when it comes to third parties will receive attention – the prices will reduce, and the capability and scalability will rise.

Murphy thinks that going forward there is room for big and small niche players alike, but that the focus will be on whether providers in general are able to collaborate and integrate with each other. “Wealth managers are all ultimately looking to do more for less and want processes systems and solutions that can facilitate that and enhance what they are offering to their clients and their own internal clients too,” he says.

Click here to access the full UK WealthTech Landscape Report 2020.