The Australian wealth management industry has some work to do. The Royal Commission 2019 report mandated better compliance and educational standards in Australia. The Australian Government has now also set a roadmap to become a world-leading digital economy and society by 2030. It wants all businesses to be digital and have integrated data and technologies that make life easier.

But the industry has been kept busy looking at product features and functionality. Innovation has been mainly around the middle and back office and moving key infrastructure to the Cloud. The focus now needs to change to making processes digital – redesigning them if necessary!

Using digital technology to make the best use of data capture and validation is one immediate area for attention.

Onboarding is the obvious area for innovation from both a customer experience and compliance perspective. In the past, this has been a tedious manual process with data relating to AML, KYC, and other details required by the client services team being inputted manually and often more than once. This process obviously risked making mistakes or incomplete information from a compliance perspective. From a customer experience viewpoint having to input the same piece of data multiple times is annoying in an industry that should be service-led.

Technology can help with this! Extraction, input, and classification of sensitive and personal data and documentation are all ripe for automation and digitisation. Any system worth its salt should extract information from virtually any document format, including handwritten pages, emails, faxes, PDFs, images, invoices, and forms.

Notably, a system should be able to reliably extract and redact handwritten notes, meaning that an organisation does not need to manually input handwritten documents from those who cannot or will not fill in forms online.

As important is the means to ignore unnecessary fields and descriptions. This means that only the required data is extracted.

Next comes automated validation. Data in the system should be in the correct format and verified across data sets, meaning that like can be compared with like and, crucially, that the wealth manager is always able to demonstrate compliance.

And having accurate and validated data feeds into not just KYC and compliance but also innovation, better decision making, and the development of products and services for customer engagement and retention. Better processes and accuracy also work to build the client relationship in the onboarding phase and beyond.

The system should also have automated processes so that advisers know what will happen to data once it has been accurately extracted. There should be an accurately routed sequence of operations and defined standard procedures across the organisation. Each and every process needs to follow a timely and consistent approval process. This improves transparency and gives back control, saving time and money and mitigating against errors – thus creating a sleeker process that pleases the regulator, advisor, and end clients alike.

The same principles apply equally to the pre-onboarding or discovery phase, where the wealth manager needs to find out as much information as possible about a prospect. That information and data come in both structured and unstructured forms, so the ability to extract, verify and then process information to make sense of it is key.

This also applies to the ongoing customer journey and is very important in the context of personalisation and honing the conversation around the entire client lifecycle. The more the wealth manager knows about someone - where they are likely to be at any given point in time, whether they have just got married, sending one of their children to university, setting up or disposing of a business - the more they can tailor the service and enhance the experience.

Hence automated data management, where complex processes are streamlined and data are brought together digitally, can only be a good thing! The end result is smoother, timelier, and more accurate processes that enhance knowledge, keep on the right side of the regulator, and delight the client – ultimately growing the business by retaining existing clients and attracting new ones!