In this 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.

As we move forward with future editions in 2023 and beyond, we expect the number of solution providers to grow. New entrants will continue to enter 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.  

Supporting the solution provider directory, the report featured a range of articles and interviews with relevant technology vendors, consultants and other relevant influencers and sources of knowledge.

Although the pandemic is becoming a memory for most, a lot is going on at all levels. On a macro level, we have regulations like the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and the FCA Consumer Duty Rules coming into play. These will each drive response in terms of the technology deployed.

The way wealth managers do business has changed, and technology needs to meet today’s needs and future-proof against what might happen tomorrow. More broadly, how wealth management could embed itself into other areas of the financial sector and how to adopt the Cloud need attention. These are exciting areas for the industry to consider and open up both the cost-saving and growth sides of the market opportunity.

The hybrid model, where clients can choose when and how to engage with their advisers, is also emerging. The end result is that clients have more frequent, but mostly shorter, touchpoints with their advisers. Again, they put the client front and centre of how wealth management is delivered (and to whom).

For the adviser, we think this means having information about the client and the portfolio to hand so that when the client gets in contact, the adviser can engage quickly and accurately.

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. 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. A lot to consider here but much of it points to the long-held desire for a true adviser desktop experience.

And this, we think, is the challenge. Wealth managers know what they need to do (mostly – though it can still be very confusing with so much change taking place), and they have the means to deliver it, by and large. The missing piece of the puzzle is what to push out, who to, over which channel, and when. While there is a depth of research around what the client wants, we are not yet sure there is a true understanding of their expectations.

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. 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.

And data is useless if it has not been cleaned up and turbocharged using AI and machine learning to produce actionable insights and personalisation. Robust analytics can make sense of a data mountain and 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. Technology is the way forward!

The full report and each of the individual articles and interviews 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 US Global Family Office (GFO) WTLR. Further reports in the series are also in the pipeline as a result of the further development of our vendor directory-first model.