Accelerating Advisor Experience

Look no further than today’s headlines and see the tremendous impact that technology is having on virtually every industry. The wealth management industry is no different – with major shifts over the past few years due to the adoption of new technology tools coupled with increased regulatory oversight and AI expansion. 

As such, wealth advisers globally and especially in Asia are facing industry-wide challenges that can either be helped or hindered by technology, depending on the approach. But to effectively compete and continue to provide exceptional service to their clients, firms need to identify and implement the right technology solutions to help them maximise efficiency while freeing up time to grow their business.

Challenge 1: Productivity

It is an undisputable fact that advisers do not spend enough time doing what they are good at, building relationships and providing high quality advice. Indeed, according to Accenture, advisors in Asia spend around 56% on non-revenue generating activities. Globally this figure appears even higher, according to Capgemini, it is estimated that advisers dedicate 67% of their time on non-revenue generating, non-client facing, activity. Much of this time is spent gathering data and information, rekeying data, correcting mistakes, and signing in and out of various applications. The same study by found that just 9% of adviser time is spent on client interactions.

Accordingly, it’s no surprise to find that in Accenture’s recent future of Asia Wealth Management report cited that the majority of clients in Singapore felt their wealth advisers could perform better – no wonder given the minimal amount of time they actually spend building and deepening relationships. This is largely because they spend the most of their time on tedious administrative tasks at the expense of time spent with clients.

In an Asia context one of the areas we see the most inefficiencies is in the area of investment proposal generation. One client we recently implemented with were spending on average over an hour generating a client proposal, this was reduced to just over 5 minutes.

Challenge 2: Data Overload

Often it feels somewhat like déjà vu talking about banks having too many disconnected systems, however the reality is that many the world’s financial institutions and banks in Asia still have more work to do to give them a consolidated and single version of truth for their data. Indeed, for a major advisory implementation InvestCloud is currently building out for a tier 1 bank in Asia today, there are over 35 integration points to support the experience.

This creates multiple challenges for banks. Firstly, it creates a huge amount of tech debt. On average around 75% of IT spend within a bank is spent on maintaining legacy systems, but more specifically for the adviser, it creates huge time inefficiencies. It is recognised in the industry that advisers typically need to login into around 5 (generally disparate, unintegrated systems) to service a client. Our experience at InvestCloud is that this is even higher. Indeed especially in the private banking space we have often encountered advisers needing 10+ systems to service clients. All this of course creates huge inefficiency through re-keying, as well as risk of data inconsistency and reputational risk.

The answer of course is to consolidate systems into one place by leveraging a solution like InvestCloud’s Digital Warehouse and then to make strategic decisions with centralised data on which legacy systems to sunset, which InvestCloud products to leverage or which InvestCloud partners to utilise across the client lifecycle.

Challenge 3: Personalisation at Scale

In Asia, where clients and investors tend to be ‘validators’ rather than ‘designators’, the importance of providing personalised recommendations, content and service at scale is fundamental to a firm’s success.

Medium to long term, we see a trend away from product-pushing, which has typified investing in Asia, and into more portfolio-based solutions. However, the reality today in Asia is that to create engagement with clients and maximise opportunity for revenue generation, clients need to be presented with high quality and empathetic trade ideas that are suitable for them. And so, one of the key areas we feel banks have an opportunity to differentiate is through the content they distribute to clients. However, for the majority of banks, doing this is inefficient and costly.

Most banks we speak to have excellent product research teams and world-class CIO views, however this research material and trade ideas come into advisers via email where they are scanned for client suitability and relevance manually be the adviser and then sent out by email. This is slow, costly and losing huge opportunity for revenue generation.

InvestCloud’s is helping banks today to automate this process and better leverage their product and research teams. By enabling a central place for content publishing followed by automatic suitability checks (ie cross-border rules, K&E etc), AI-enabled Natural language processing and finally automatic distribution either direct to clients or via the adviser, the InvestCloud platform is digitising the content lifecycle and creating huge additional opportunities for revenue generation through personalised material for clients.

Accordingly, for all the key challenges listed above, the InvestCloud platform is able to deploy product solutions, enabled by AI that allow advisers in Asia to focus their time on what’s important, their clients and new business opportunities.

RELATED CONTENT