The digital wealth manager of today

The goal for digital transformation in wealth management

Many CEOs, CTOs, and operational leaders have been working hard to drive change throughout their organizations over the last few years. As a result, the digital transformation in wealth management is well underway, but it will likely take another five years of sustained technological investments to achieve what has been deemed the end goal: a digitally enabled, hyper-personalized, scalable business model.

Not all wealth management leaders have achieved the same degree of progress towards executing this vision. Larger firms, together with dominant asset managers with extensive retail distributions, have been able to invest heavily in improving functionality across the front, middle, and back offices. On the other end of the spectrum, regional businesses often find themselves fighting to keep up.

It's not always a case of larger firms outspending smaller firms, either. Smarter investing, more strategic planning, and maintaining momentum are the common traits amongst businesses that are pulling ahead in the race to transformation. Many of these leadership teams credit the digitization of front-office function, which can provide teams with new digital tools designed to engage with clients directly and more effectively. Additionally, digital wealth management trends show that sourcing better data can offer a competitive advantage, particularly when teams had prioritized the modernization of their existing infrastructure early in the transformation journey.

Existing digital wealth management trends

The past few years have also seen increased innovation in wealth management. The development of fresh, modern programs and processes for advisors has been critical to delivering new digital experiences to financial advisors and their teams. For example, firms are considering how to pair an investor with the right advisor to co-create a plan, followed by continued testing and iterations of this plan as part of the ongoing relationship. In turn, the goal is to have the partnership executing against this plan through transactions and trades and various forms of investment.

Now, CIOs are shifting attention towards core business operations, where they can build better client experiences and solve pain points before they even emerge. Clients are wanting a more personalized overall experience, which means financial advisers are looking for high quality, relevant data to work with. Many leaders are focused on improving data infrastructures to empower their teams to meet these ever-increasing demands.

Subsequently, industry leaders are also realizing that the modernization of front-office functions simply isn’t enough to deliver the desired advisor/client experiences. The problem usually stems from too many client and advisor processes being integrated across functions built into the front, middle, or back-office systems. On top of that, these systems are usually dependent on the often-decentralized applications and processes that support the number of products and services required to support a wealth management business. As a result, improvements to the front office felt like a band-aid solution that only highlighted the need to modernize core operations as well. Transforming core operations is a technology-led process, so high-level buy-in can have a major impact on success.

Mapping out next steps

If the industry transformation is to be sustained and ultimately delivered to retail investors, advisors, and shareholders, then tech management and change adoption will need to continue to serve as overarching core competencies. Read the full report to discover the many factors your business should consider when looking to achieve a successful end-to-end digital transformation in wealth management.