For decades we believed the differentiating element to lead our customers to choose us was our ability to give greater returns than our competitors. It was mainly a face to face activity and to a large extent still is effective in establishing close relationships and building trust with clients.

This assumption remains true, but there is a new world out there now which is driven by this term digital integration and it changed most businesses dramatically in the last years, even accelerated that change during the Covid pandemic.

Our customers want to grow their client base reaching digital savvy people, giving early financial planning advice, catching the early savers and bringing them along for life.
They need to increase their digital penetration, to move away from paper reports and to increase the cycle of regular valuations electronically.

Also, they want to use technology to drive up portfolio management automation and standardise throughout the group, simultaneously, improving their margins over time and ultimately their profits.

Three Step To Heaven

There are 3 steps to digital transformation.

First, you have to build a reliable, open and consistent digital business data layer to empower clients to access their investment information and providing advisors with relevant information, real-time and actionable insights to act upon customer preferences.

Then you can deliver a superior digital customer experience, designing a superior opti-channel CX, including Investor & Advisor Portal, app and wearables, enhancing timely and personalised interaction anytime and anywhere.

Finally you have to make digital the new standard, completing the open wealth architecture with digital native business processes, to achieve a complete digital transformation.

What sort of functionalities should we deploy?

Start with managing any aspect of client lifecycle from the lead and acquisition phase, constructing the sales pitch to the client, sending out the resulting proposal and get agreement with digital signature. They are all activities that involve documents, collaboration and interaction, that are candidates for digital automation.

The relationship managers shall view every aspect of the client in one single view. On the same screen they can see interactions with clients from Outlook or the secure message system, prioritising the most urgent messages. They can view performance and risk of multi goals investments, and drill down to every level of detail. On another screen, they can manage clients’ prospective: promotional events of interest, presentations, proposal contract current stage and much more.

Finally combining data with monitoring they can recognise potential events or breaks or outliers so that you can quickly bring investments back in line.

Also reporting can be interactive so that it not just a static report. The clients can now drill from top level down to a holding down to the transactions, posing a question to send to my advisor just like you do in word when reviewing a document.

Moving to digital works best when your technology is supported by open API’s. Even with older applications, you can put technology in front to wrap API’s into its operation, finding a way to communicate and automate. That’s how RPA came about and it’s not going away.

The firm committed to digital can clearly benefit from achieving the desired goals in terms of growth, relevance and efficiency.

In addition, at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic is putting the financial sector’s resilience to the test, the implemented digital solution met customer’s increased needs to work without barriers, staying in touch online in a secure, efficient and cost-effective way.