Enhanced customer onboarding must be a wealth management priority

Differentiation in delivering advanced customer experience in the wealth management industry is becoming of paramount importance, as the offering is niche and the market needs are constantly changing. To effectively address competitive challenges, Wealth Management firms tend to deploy technologies that stipulate the uniqueness and personalisation of their customer service.

Digitising the customer journey – including the provision of the same ‘look and feel’ across users, while automating processes from onboarding to valuation and rebalancing – can contribute to a transformation that is easy to deploy and can offer great returns to the business. In most cases, the front-end systems perform this automation and therefore often receive greater attention. However, equally important is the ability of the back-end system to analyse and process information fast and accurately so as to complete complex or demanding operations with ease. By combining a user-friendly, customisable and personalised front-end with a robust back-end, firms usually accomplish better customer fulfilment as the information is instantly updated without the need for any manual processing to ensure validation of data. Depending on the policies in place, firms can also achieve easy compliance with regulatory changes (GDPR, MiFID II, etc).

So, to remain competitive, companies and vendors aim to provide advanced functionality that automates the onboarding process, while also ensuring that customer data is protected and the process is user-friendly. The goal is to make this process as flexible and frictionless as possible. Customers experiencing speed, ease, security and convenience during onboarding, are more likely to remain loyal, think positively of the brand and provide referrals. By boosting customer experience from the start, professional investors are able to focus on more value-add activities.

A key driver according to Capgemini’s Top 10 trends in wealth management 2018 is that customer experience revolves around simplifying key touch points, creating intuitive and easy-to-use features within complex investment management tools and offering seamless omni-channel portfolio management capabilities.

1. AI tools expand across the industry, since AI-enhanced data analytics can complement traditional financial analysis by providing unique insights
2. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can help firms save up to 60% on time–to-resolution of repetitive tasks
3. Innovation is key to making firms future-ready, such as with automated advisory services, for example
4. Marketplaces are becoming attractive to distribute wealth management products and offer more insights
5. Advances in digitisation can enhance customer experience and thereby increase sustainable competitive advantage
6. Security still remains a significant element of the process
7. Costs may increase due to regulations, however these can be offset by deploying best services to achieve better processing and compliance
8. Hybrid advice is on the rise, acting as an opportunity to provide a differentiated approach
9. Addressing new unserved or underserved market segments with a personalised service is becoming achievable with digital tools
10. Fees, based on performance and modularity, are more likely to increase, stemming from both the changing regulatory patterns as well as the evolution of FinTech.

These trends highlight the continuous changes the wealth management industry is under, as a result of the transformations taking place in the technological, legal and social environment. At the centre of all these changes is the customer experience. The potential customer benefits can also be seen as the opportunity for firms to achieve competitive customer service with transparency, while targeting new markets. Wealth management can follow in the footsteps of retail banking to enrich customer offerings. In the long-run, deploying these innovations can contribute to savings in time and resources. Ready-to-use connection with other systems is also required so as to ensure data integrity and to streamline operations across users. The ‘single screen’ customer view allows for consistency, easy reporting and personalisation, where needed, to address growing market requirements. 

For more than a quarter of a century, Profile Software has been developing solutions that empower Wealth Managers to leverage market opportunities through digitalisation across many regions and disciplines.

Axia is a pioneering omni-channel investment management platform that automates the full process, offers flexible and powerful reporting as well as risk metrics to safeguard the business, while providing interfaces to custodian banks and market data providers. In addition, it has a ready-to-use robo advisory solution that delivers a completely automated self-service platform that can be utilised as a hybrid model to help firms capitalise on evolving market trends.

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