Reading time: 2 min
OWINTALK | BEHIND BUSINESS, BEYOND NEWS
When in early 2020, we were hit by the Covid pandemic, we started wondering about how this would affect our business and how we could cope with such a disruption.
Many firms were exposed by the delay in digital transformation accumulated over the recent years, with the risk of their clients not feeling properly served and start looking elsewhere.
Now, after almost two years, I believe it is time to look to back mirror, and see, if and how, the wealth management market has reacted and reinvented itself to survive and reborn.
Reinvention
For sure, at the beginning of this emergency, everyone was caught by panic. Markets faced an heavy draw down and everyone’s priority, was to reassure and retain clients.
Soon after we had to cope with the need to find new ways of engaging with our clients. We had to introduce remote digital collaboration tools, organise our companies to completely work from remote, suddenly and in a very short time.
For those who had invested, before 2020, in multichannel modern digital software to suppor their clients, front office and middle office staff, the gap to cover was smaller. Those that still hadn’t started a business digital transformation program, the challenge was higher, with the situation made even worse by the fact the emergency did quickly strain the available budgets for all companies.
Rebirth
Luckily, some unexpectedly great things quickly emerged from what seemed like an impossibly bad situation:
- Researchers and regulators could accelerate the vaccine development process to 10 months, which would otherwise take 10 years showing all the world that a rebirth was possible
- Markets did rebound quickly thanks to a newfound confidence in the future
- We stopped panicking and started to focus on how to reinvent, reshape and modernise our business to prepare for to the new normal defined by a post-pandemic scenario.
Starting from early 2021 we have seen several wealth management and private banking players focused on redefining their IT and business strategy, driven by the lessons learned in the initial emergency times.
Big players started important digital transformation programs delivering new digital capabilities, rethinking their customer engagement approach in native digital terms, launching apps for investors and IFAs, redesigning their operations and application stack to get more agile and ready for required innovation. And we believe this trend will continue in 2022 and next years to come.
The players that were too small or simply not ready to cope with this unexpected disruption have either been acquired by bigger more modern firms or have changed their business model moving to outsourcing or selling/dismissing not performing businesses.
As we face the end of 2021 thanks to the vaccination campaign, that is now completing its third wave, we can have a positive outlook for the future, despite the recent rise of cases. We don’t feel we will fall back into what we experience in early 2020.
We have learnt how to live in this new normal, we have started to reinvent, redesign, modernise our businesses, so we have reasons to believe we are on the verge of a new growth cycle.
