Wealth Management is changing dramatically. The first post of this series has demonstrated how revenue growth is enabled by modern platforms. The second will take into account the perspective of a changing client base, and it will discuss how to deliver the right customer experience to these clients through a modern platform.

Demographics and change in generation

Change in generation of wealth holders is approaching – both due to an older generation passing on its wealth, and a younger generation seeing the fruits of their work. This younger generation has different expectations regarding transparency of decisions on their portfolio; they are also more self-directed, tech and social media-savvy.

These clients will not be content with a service which is opaque to them – many want to understand the structure of their portfolio, and also the impact their investments may have externally. This demands for a new, more transparent customer experience – providing informed clients with capabilities to perform deep analysis of their portfolio, “what-if” scenarios and advanced risk and performance measures – which has to be delivered through a platform.

These analytical capabilities overlap with those required by the advisor and will result in an increasing alignment between the client and advisor front-end.

Furthermore, digital research platforms allow self-directed research into markets and products. Audio-visual and gamified content makes complex topics transparent and raises client maturity.

As a result, the dynamics in the relationship between client and advisor will change, facilitating a co-creative conversation on the portfolio in a flexible interaction model.

Transforming the advisory processes

In the last decade, the wealth market has become bifurcated: the lower end of the market moved to funds and standardized portfolios, while individual portfolios, which are more expensive to maintain, tend to be reserved for the UHNWI segment.

This leaves an “advisory gap” in the mid-market. It is targeted by fin-techs and fast-moving competitors deploying robo-advisory technology to service their clients better and more effectively.

Embracing these techniques allows wealth managers to provide a more customized service for a broader range of portfolios, widen their client base. Integrating these approaches with an effective, industrialized end-to-end process results in considerable operational cost savings, driven by effort for processes ranging from portfolio setup and rebalancing to client reporting, breach notifications and documentation.

Figure 1 Effective time to construct an investment proposal[1]

At the same time, it provides significant increases in effectiveness in a hybrid or purely personal advisory model: Firms expect it to shorten the time to prepare client meetings considerably (Figure 2). Furthermore, being able to share draft investment proposals with the client can result in material time savings for both parties.

COVID-19 and the change in interaction models

Private banking and wealth management are traditionally relationship-based and tend to focus more on personal advice. In fact, clients clearly prefer in-person interaction for complex transactions.

Figure 2 Client preferred interaction channels by complexity[2]

However, COVID-19 has disrupted the notion that “personal” is synonymous to “face to face”. Complementing physical meetings by embedded video and audio functionality and co-browsing has proven a time-saver both for clients and advisors. Electronic signature and digital identity solutions enable onboarding and transaction closure without exchange of physical documents. Modern platforms integrate these interactions in an intelligent way at every step of the process, allowing to get in touch with an expert exactly when it is required, without the need to meet or to set up a phone call. Clients and advisors acknowledge the benefits of a more diverse range of interactions, and they are likely to stay.

Client Onboarding and Digital Identities

This use of digital signatures is only to expand. Digital trust platforms such as Adobe, DocuSign, InfoCert and Namirial enable legally binding contracting without the disruptive need to exchange physical paper. Progress in government-issued digital identities, such as those embedded in German ID cards, together with the evolution of the legal framework, will further increase security and legal enforceability.

However, there is a broader opportunity for banks. By becoming the centre of a digital trust network enabling other providers such as retailers to leverage their trust infrastructure, they can capitalize on the effort invested in establishing client identity in the KYC process, and find new value streams.

Platforms should be well-integrated with digital signature workflows and digital identities to enable both seamless customer experience and effective operations.

Value-based pricing

Pricing based on assets under management has been criticized as being insensitive to outcomes to clients. In response, asset managers have introduced outcome-linked fees. Despite conceptual challenges in such an approach, platforms should support this fee model as well as provide the capabilities to reflect future fee models.

Summary

The wealth management industry has the opportunity for considerable innovation of client experience, benefitting both customer outcomes and its own bottom line. This requires wealth management platforms to provide new capabilities in areas such as integration of robo-advisory tools, video and audio communications and digital identities.

The next part of this series will review how product innovation can be enabled by platforms.

Further reading:

Wealth Management: The digital shift - Banking blog (deloitte.ch)

Wealth and Asset Management 4.0: How digital, social, and economic shifts will transform the industry | Deloitte Global

Swiss banks: How to master client experience in the digital age - Banking blog (deloitte.ch)

COVID-19: Digitally-enabled Wealth Managers will lead the way in the 'new normal' - Banking blog (deloitte.ch)

Digital Identity Management – When IT and Marketing Align | Deloitte US

[1] Source: Building fully integrated digital advisory platforms. Key insights from Deloitte's European WM advisory survey December 2021 – Swiss WM COE – Authors: Patrik Spiller, Christoph Künzle

[2] MonitorDeloitte 2017, Innovation in Private Banking & Wealth Management

Sergio Cruz - Partner, Consulting

Sergio is the lead Partner of Deloitte’s Business Operations practice in Zurich and has more than 25 year of experience in Consulting. He focuses on large scale front-to-back digitalisation programs in financial services and has worked on several large assignments both in Switzerland and abroad, covering the implementation of regulatory requirements and the definition as well as implementation of target operating models and process optimisations.

Email | LinkedIn

Dominik Ouschan - Director, Financial Services

Dominik is a Director in Deloitte’s Consulting Business Operations team in Zurich and has more than 10 years of experience in consulting. Dominik’s main area of expertise are target operating models related to the client lifecycle management. He is the lead for Deloitte’s Industry Solutions offering, focusing on front-to-back platform replacements. His expertise also includes the IT stack enabling an efficient and effective support of the front-to-back business processes.

Email  | LinkedIn

 

Thomas Obitz, Deloitte Associate, Guest Author

Thomas is an expert in target operating model and business architecture in the banking industry, especially in investment banking, risk and regulatory driven change. He has more than 20 years of consulting experience. Focussing on risk transformation, he combines quantitative, regulatory and procedural risk knowledge with large-scale business and IT transformation experience. He led teams and oversaw change processes in global organizations. Thomas has published on risk change and market risk (FRTB) and is a regular speaker at conferences and trainings.

Email

 

Thomas Wangler, Senior Manager, Financial Services Transformation

Thomas is a Senior Manager with 13 years of experience in the Financial Services Industry, working in the Business Operations Service Offering of Deloitte Consulting AG leading the Industry Solution for Core-Banking Systems. He has profound experience in the field of technological banking transformation as well as target operating model design and implementation with his main focus being around Core Banking Systems - Program Management, Requirements Engineering, Release and Change Management, Testing.

Email