The wealth management industry is currently undergoing a transformative phase as it seeks to enhance the client experience amidst a rapidly changing and competitive landscape. A recent presentation at The Wealth Mosaic’s CX Toolkit Roadshow event in Zurich brought together industry leaders to explore strategies for achieving growth and profitability while tackling the unique challenges posed by evolving financial pressures, demographic shifts, and advancing technologies. This event focused on how wealth management firms can thrive by delivering personalised client experiences, building stronger relationships, and leveraging technological advancements.
Understanding industry challenges
At the core of the presentation at The Wealth Mosaic’s CX Toolkit Roadshow event in Zurich was a fundamental question:
How can wealth management firms achieve growth, profitability, and a competitive edge in this dynamic environment?
To address this, the presentation emphasised three essential components:
-
WHY?
Defining the core purpose behind wealth management services in a customer-centric era -
WHAT?
Identifying the key challenges that need to be overcome to remain competitive -
HOW?
Exploring innovative concepts and solutions to meet these challenges
The wealth management industry faces significant financial pressures, including weak net new asset growth, shrinking margins, and growing client price sensitivity. Compounding these pressures is the accelerating structural change in the market. The provider landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented, leading to fierce competition. Wealth managers must now navigate uncertainty and ambiguity, driven by demographic shifts, geopolitical changes, and evolving client preferences. These challenges make it harder for firms to differentiate themselves and build strong relationships with clients.
The ten key challenges facing the wealth management industry today
To succeed in this landscape, wealth management firms need to address ten critical challenges identified during the presentation:
- Stand out in the age of personalisation:
- As clients demand tailored experiences, firms must find ways to offer highly personalised services
- Deliver client-centric advice at scale:
- Providing customised advice to a large client base is essential for sustained growth
- Provide a seamless, consistent omnichannel experience:
- Clients now expect to interact with firms across multiple platforms without disruptions in service
- Create synergies with modular offerings:
- Firms must design flexible solutions that cater to diverse client needs
- Elevate relationship management:
- Strengthening client relationships through trust and communication is crucial
- Redefine the role of the relationship manager:
- The role must evolve to meet the demands of modern clients, incorporating technology and data-driven insights
- Outperform on organic growth:
- Firms need to focus on generating growth from their existing client base while also attracting new clients
- Overcome complexity in operations:
- Simplifying internal processes can lead to better service delivery and efficiency
- Future-proof technology and data infrastructure:
- Firms must invest in scalable, secure, and adaptable technology
- Redesign key control functions:
- Optimising governance and control functions will ensure compliance while enhancing flexibility
Key concepts and solutions
To tackle these challenges, the presentation explored 20 key concepts designed to reshape the client experience in wealth management. These included adopting next-generation CRM systems that enable relationship managers to deliver more personalised advice and leveraging AI-driven tools to gain deeper insights into client needs. The shift from a product-centric to a client-centric approach was another key focus, with firms encouraged to transition to a model that prioritizes the client’s overall financial well-being rather than merely pushing products.
AI-powered technology can help firms deliver personalised insights to clients, offering recommendations tailored to their individual financial situations. By harnessing the power of AI, wealth managers can better understand client behaviour, anticipate needs, and provide more valuable advice. Additionally, the development of advisor co-pilots – AI-driven tools designed to assist relationship managers – was highlighted as a way to optimise service delivery and improve the client experience.
Steps for incremental transformation
The presentation concluded by recommending a roadmap for incremental transformation that would allow wealth management firms to gradually implement these concepts while managing risk. By focusing on short-term wins and long-term goals, firms can avoid the disruption that often accompanies major technological or operational shifts. Examples of successful implementation were shared, including firms that have already streamlined their CRM systems and shifted their focus from product-centric sales to holistic wealth planning.
By embracing these concepts and solutions, wealth management firms can not only survive but thrive in a rapidly changing industry, offering personalised, client-centric services that build loyalty and drive growth.
About the author:
Alex is a Director at EY. He is also the Switzerland Leader, EY Global Center for Wealth Management. His focus areas include: business strategy, business & operating model design and implementation, products & services strategy and operationalisation. Alex has significant experience in building and leading diverse and high performing transformation teams. He is passionate about driving innovative client-centric solutions in the private banking and wealth & asset management industry. He has a proven track record in end-to-end delivery of cross-regional projects within complex corporate structures and regulatory frameworks.
About EY:
EY exists to build a better working world, helping to create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets.
Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.
Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.
About The Wealth Mosaic CX Toolkit Roadshow:
Following the publication of our CX Toolkit report, we have so far hosted events in Geneva, Zurich, London, with plans to host further events in Singapore and Dubai in 2025. These are free to attend for any form of wealth manager and provide technology vendors an opportunity to sponsor or demo.
About The Wealth Mosaic CX Report:
The Client Experience Toolkit 2024 is the first in a new series of toolkit reports focused on key technology themes and tools impacting global wealth management. Each toolkit report focuses on a key industry theme, segment or geography.
This first issue takes the form of a thematic report and shines a light on the trends and solutions influencing the successful delivery of client experience (CX) in wealth management. It features 11 showcases, each centred around a dedicated CX-relevant topic and related solution.
You can access the report online here.
