The renowned market analyst firm Celent analysed the North American wealth management market in their February report, Front-to-Middle Office Platforms: North American Wealth Management Edition: 2021 Vendor Spectrum, Powered by VendorMatch  , examining both the near future prospects of the business, and the leading North American providers of Front-to-Middle Office platforms to serve this segment. In the report, Celent Senior Wealth Management Analyst, Ashley Longabaugh, cites the following trends in the front-to-middle office market.

Wealth Management Global Drivers for 2021

2021 promises to be as challenging as the year before, as the pandemic will continue to play a critical role in shaping traditional advisory and operational models, which came under pressure for the social distancing measures. Other factors that have already started to impact on the wealth management sector, in North America and globally – such as fee compression and wealth transfer towards the younger generations of investors – will further spread their effects.

Focus and Spend on Digital Engagement and Client Lifecycle Management

There’s a growing demand for digital client engagement and lifecycle management in the wealth management industry. But organisations are equally looking for integrated solutions that are able to make all the advisor’s activity and tasks available as a cockpit.

Bringing the client relationship and the advisor’s work to centre stage entails growing demand for augmented intelligence to deliver mass customised investment proposals – where clients receive their investment proposals and can approve and follow-up digitally – and for an opti-channel mix to collaborate and interact with digital-savvy investors

Change in cloud adoption

The hybrid, multi-cloud approach is gathering increasing acceptance by financial institutions, who are thus adopting business critical capabilities in the easiest way. Migration to the cloud is happening at different speeds, however. This is originating hybrid installations based on different strategies and multi-cloud solutions.

At Objectway, for instance, we already support over 100 clients on cloud with more than one trillion Euros of assets under management.

More Clients, Increased AuM, in Less Time

In this research paper Celent commended Objectway for “the completeness of the solution and the dedication that the team has demonstrated to bolstering the usability of each module,” confirming the findings illustrated in the parent report, focused on the EMEA region.

In the report, Celent considered as fundamental characteristics of the mentioned solutions their components supporting key workflows, such as the provision of an exclusive client experience, and an end-to-end advisory process in an integrated workflow and single infrastructure.

In line with this, in our view the challenge for a performant and future-proof front-to-middle office system is to provide firms with the most effective and state-of-the-art tools to serve more clients and manage increased AuM, in less time.

Source: Celent report – Front-to-Middle Office Platforms: North American Wealth Management Edition: 2021 Vendor Spectrum, Powered by VendorMatch