As we prepare to launch our 2023 UK WealthTech Landscape report (UK WTLR) we thought it apt to look back on last year’s report and reflect on how the issues we tackled then have evolved.

In our 2022 edition of the UK WTLR, we included 726 solution providers, all of which came from the growing number of 2,500 plus solution provider profiles we host business and solution profiles for in our directory-led website (https://www.thewealthmosaic.com/).

As we move forward with our 2023 edition and beyond, we are very much expecting the number of solution providers to grow; new entrants will continue to come into the market, and our knowledge of what is out there will increase. This market expansion will occur despite the ongoing theme of vendor-on-vendor M&A.  

Content-wise, last year, we featured some 10 pieces written by solution providers. In the 2023 report, we are featuring content from vendors, wealth managers and consultants alike, striving to bring together all sides of the market and serve the whole community with a rounded and well-considered selection of thought leadership pieces.

Last year we found that the pandemic had become and memory, and the industry was moving on to tackle regulations like Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and the FCA Consumer Duty. Consumer Duty, in particular, has been a much-discussed topic and something that firms may struggle with if they do not have the data and processes to evidence best practices and optimal outcomes. But in fact, this represents an opportunity if wealth managers can consider Consumer Duty as a guideline for best practices and adapt and upgrade technology accordingly.

Last year also saw an emergent Wealth Management as a Service (WMaaS) enter into people’s thoughts. While this has yet to become everyday, it is gaining traction as a concept and as a means to extend the reach of the wealth manager to new client segments and areas that were previously tapped. Technology is a massive enabler of this, and having the right model in place to forge new links will be crucial in this respect.

The hybrid model, where clients can choose when and how to engage with their advisers, was emerging last year. This is now firmly embedded – clients should have a choice over how they communicate with their wealth manager – and that includes face-to-face. Indeed although digital allows for more frequent, but mostly shorter, touchpoints with their advisers, putting the client front and centre of how wealth management is delivered means that the human option remains a central component of the wealth management offering.

For the adviser, the need to have information about the client and the portfolio to hand so that when the client does get in contact, the adviser can engage quickly and accurately has become even more important, and to further this, being able to leverage data to provide a personalised service is rapidly becoming a ‘table stakes’ capability, rather than a nice to have.

Something else now considered very normal is enhancing engagement and client experience by the adviser pushing out relevant data, research, and other insight to the client – using digital channels and deciding what to push out, who to, over which channel, and when. They need a dashboard, too, to see that data in the processes and workflows, i.e., onboarding, risk and suitability, and client lifecycle, so that they can easily ‘see’ their client at the touch of a button.

Clearly, many of last year’s themes remain relevant and with the ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ imminent, wealth managers are going to need to service clients old and new in the way that the client desires. Doing that will require thinking about how technology can best support the adviser and how the data held by the wealth managers can best be leveraged to maximise the opportunity.

For this to happen, wealth managers need to become master data gatherers or data miners and analysts, using not only information provided by the client but also sourced from elsewhere too: social media, companies’ houses, the media, etc. The sources of data have grown enormously, but we still hear so frequently the data challenges of wealth managers, the paper, the old files in the basement, and so on. Two worlds, the old and the new, collide.

The full report and each of the individual articles and interviews from last year are hosted here.

Ultimately, as we continue to grow our solution provider directory and put more content and knowledge out into the market, we hope we can help the UK (and other) wealth management sectors make more informed decisions about their technology infrastructure and stay abreast of the market’s status.

The WTLR Series
The UK WTLR is part of a series of reports we call The WealthTech Landscape Report Series. Other reports published in this series so far include the Swiss WTLR, the APAC WLTR and the US RIA WTLR and the Middle East WTLR in the pipeline as a result of the further development of our vendor directory-first model.