The industry is putting the pandemic firmly behind it. But we have learned so much from that turbulent time, and the market has emerged looking so very different from the days when no one had even heard of Covid-19.

Today’s headline is future-proofing. Indeed, reading this report, people know there is a lot going on at all levels. On a macro level, we have regulations like the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) coming into play, which will create the means to compare and contrast investments for ESG purposes. The FCA Consumer Duty Rules will further bolster the requirement to properly describe and govern products and will impact suitability.

More broadly, there is thought being given as to how wealth management could embed itself into other areas of the financial sector. And, of course, how to adopt the Cloud, the benefits of doing so, and the need to align the business to a digital strategy - and what that would mean on a micro-level for compliance, onboarding, customer experience, and the like.

The way wealth managers do business has changed, and technology needs to meet today’s needs and future proof against what might happen tomorrow. Gone are the days of the paper report and infrequent face-to-face meetings with advisers, and here to stay is a hybrid model where clients can choose when and how to engage with their advisers. That can be via messaging, via a client portal, or over a virtual meeting. What matters is that it can be done digitally. The end result is that clients have more frequent but mostly shorter touchpoints with their advisers.

For the adviser, this means a need to have information about the client and the portfolio to hand so that when the client does get in contact, the adviser can respond quickly and accurately – having all the client’s details to hand makes for better service levels. It promotes engagement between client and adviser, thus having a positive impact on retention and even recommendation.

Engagement and client experience can be further bolstered 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.

And this is the challenge. Wealth managers know what they need to do, and they have the means to deliver it, by and large. Client portals are no longer new and exciting, they are now a must-have in some form or other, and advisers and clients alike are now used to engaging with each other in a variety of formats.

The missing piece of the puzzle is what to push out, who to, over which channel, and when. Harnessing data to be able to make those decisions is, we think, one of the most important challenges that wealth managers now face.

Firstly, they need to be able to present data and analytics in an easy-to-consume format at the front end for clients. This is the ‘what’. For that to be successful, the need is to have a single, clean source of data and an integration layer to pull it all together and present it at the front end.

The ‘who’ meanwhile relies on the ability of the wealth manager to truly know their customer. For this to happen, they 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. All this information is for the advisers. 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.

But all of that ‘who’ data is useless if it has not been cleaned up and turbocharged using AI and machine learning to produce actionable insights. Indeed, the ‘who’ is heavily reliant on the right analytics to provide personalisation. This is more than a broad segmentation exercise. It is the means to know who might be interested in a new ESG opportunity or want to read about the new ESG overlay capability. It is knowing where the client is in life and suggesting interesting asset allocations or lifecycle planning, it is about knowing that a new digital asset is coming and who might be interested and why.

But more than this is the ‘how’ and ‘when’ to provide this information and insight, according to client preference. Again, this comes down to robust analytics to make sense of a data mountain and come out with something useful, and know when to approach and when not to.

If wealth managers can harness technologies to do this, they delight the clients on a service level, meaning they retain them and might even get recommendations. And technology is the way to do it!

As with each of the other reports published in our ongoing WealthTech Landscape Report Series (WTLRs) program, our goal with the UK WTLR 2022 is to showcase the depth, breadth, and growing range of technology and related solution providers (meaning things like analysts, compliance, consulting, data, insights, etc.) available to the wealth management community within the UK.

In this 2022 edition of the UK WTLR series, we have included 726 solution providers. As we move forward with future editions in 2023 and beyond, we very much expect that number to grow. That will reflect two simultaneous developments: (1) the number of solution providers offering solutions to this market most likely continuing to grow in number and (2) our own knowledge of this market and supporting process to discover and stay up to date as best we can with this growing number of relevant solution providers.

In short, we are bringing you the complete WealthTech landscape for the UK market in one place.

Each and every one of the 726 solution providers included in the A-Z Solution Provider Directory at the back of this report has (or soon will have in the few cases where the firm is a new discovery within our research process) a business and solution profile hosted in our Solution Provider Directory.

While this report is a one-time showcase of this market, our online Solution Provider Directory is available 24/7, 365-days a year as a digital host of solution provider profiles, solution profiles, and content. Whatever your profile, this resource has been built to the business needs of firms in the UK and the wider wealth management sector across the world.

Background to the UK WTLR 2022
When we set out to build The Wealth Mosaic, we chose to focus our directory-based knowledge resource first and foremost on the growing marketplace of technology solution providers in the sector. That decision was not taken by accident. The business case for the role and relevance of technology within the wealth management sector was growing. This was coupled with the related rise in the number of technology offerings entering the market, much of it built for wealth management (#builtforwealth). Our decision to focus on this has been fully bourned out.

What we have learned as we have built The Wealth Mosaic, and continued to develop it, is that the depth and breadth of the technology and related provider market to wealth managers is both large and increasingly diverse. Some key points are:

• There is no lack of technology!

• There are an increasing number of #builtforwealth solutions focused on specific challenges and/or segments of the market.

• Partnerships among providers are growing and multiplying as providers realise the benefits of collaboration for all parties.

• There are not just more specific #wealthtech offerings in the market but a massive marketplace of mass-market technology that can be applied for wealth (marketing technology being a good example).

In short, the evolution of the technology marketplace around the wealth management sector, aka #wealthtech, continues to evolve. Even if technology still has pain points, we believe that continued development is ultimately for the benefit of the wealth management market. We look forward to getting deeper into the market’s development and its many offerings as we continue to build out this report and our website behind it.

Indeed, by creating and publishing this report annually, and by linking its development and maintenance to our website, we are working towards an annual report (backed by an online resource that is developing by the day) that seeks to capture every single technology and related solution provider serving, seeking to serve or relevant to the business needs the UK wealth management market.

Everything is in one place, available to wealth managers and all others, and focused on wealth management. That is the goal. However, it is important to state that this is a journey. We do not yet claim to have a ‘full’ view of the market, especially across those large markets of general technology that can also be applied to wealth management. We are still learning and still discovering, and we are still frequently surprised by some of the market participants we discover in building this resource and then making that available to the market for free here and on our website.

Ultimately, we hope we can help the UK wealth management sector make more informed decisions about their technology infrastructure and stay abreast of the market’s status.

This article is from The Wealth Mosaic’s UK WealthTech Landscape Report 2022. Access the full report here.