Digital Experience and Client Experience Are Now Inseparable in Wealth Management

Historically, digital channels have played a secondary role to the personal trust-based relationship between a client and their Wealth Manager. However, increasingly, a poor digital experience erodes clients’ trust and has a tangible impact on client retention and likelihood of referrals.

Clients’ expectations around the digital experience are not set in Wealth Management, but through their use of other digital services: both inside and outside their financial lives. Clients will soon be using AI-enabled technology to work, shop, write, and learn. In this new digital world, it becomes increasingly untenable not to allow your clients to update their address, request a change to a beneficiary, or sign a document through your digital channels.

While this trend may only be starting to impact Wealth Managers’ top line now, the quality of external digital products and clients’ digital expectations are set to accelerate rapidly as we approach 2030:

By neglecting clients’ digital needs, Wealth Managers risk low adoption of digital channels which drives increased cost to serve, and higher rates of client dissatisfaction and attrition. Therefore, it is fundamental that Wealth Managers today have a credible digital strategy alongside the funding to invest in their digital client experience over the next 5 years.

Over the past five years, we’ve seen Wealth Managers invest in their digital channels, but the correlation between level of investment and client experience is low. At its core, digital client experience is only as valuable as its ability to empower relationship managers to have more meaningful conversations with their clients about issues that truly matter. Our experience with Wealth Management clients suggests that historic investment has been limited by unclear and changing digital roadmaps, poor vendor selection, and legacy architecture that restricts digital offerings.

With Relationship Managers (RMs) spending only 30% of their time in front of clients, it’s crucial that this time isn’t wasted on mundane activities that could (and should) have been automated or delivered through self-serve channels. This is where digital is fundamental to supporting the development of relationships between client and relationship manager – and where digital experience (DX) and client experience (CX) become inextricably linked.

To succeed in a DX transformation, Wealth Managers must enhance their digital services without compromising the high-quality and personal service their clients expect. The following principles are key to achieving this balance:

1. Enhance Relationships, Don’t Replace Them: Clients pay for personalized service; extend digital offerings without eliminating existing service channels.
2. Understand Your Clients’ Needs: Recognize your core proposition, identify your current and target client base, and understand their present and future needs. Prioritize build accordingly.
3. Prioritize User Experience Design: Develop a digital client experience with best-practice user interface / user experience (UI/UX) design principles at the forefront.
4. Provide Instant & Contextual Information: Ensure you are offering up-to-date, relevant data through digital channels to support clients’ needs, including detailed performance and holdings analytics and service request statuses.
5. Plan for Uncertainty with a Scalable Architecture: Avoid rebuilding existing functionality or integrations from scratch. Instead, ensure your front end easily and flexibly integrates with your technology architecture, especially with your CRM and Portfolio Management Service (PMS).