Comment aider les conseiller en gestion de patrimoine pour être plus efficace et pertinent dans la relation client

Guest blog by Philippe Poirot, Head of Strategy Marketing and Offerings, Microsoft Financial Industry Services

(English translation is included below)

Just like Microsoft, many wealth management companies are passionate about digitization and automation. For them, it’s about strengthening employee performance, customer engagement, and process efficiency. Achieving excellence on these 3 pillars is a priority objective to develop business activity and increase revenue.

In concrete terms, digital is an asset to transform the business and the customer relationship. Digitalization allows, for example, the elimination of manual administrative tasks in order to free up time reallocated to customer relations and thus generate revenue. Very significant gains can be made by removing the routine and repetitive tasks that have plagued customer relationship managers for many years. Thanks to digital, many wealth managers can quickly and easily benefit from the use of AI to help them process large amounts of client data in order to make relevant recommendations to their client in real time. These types of solutions and analytics at scale reveal operational solutions that will strengthen the advisor-client relationship in a way that simply isn’t conceivable otherwise.

Often when asked this question to a CEO in charge of wealth management: “What is the biggest problem for client relationship managers?” most are likely to answer “Not giving the right information to the client at the right time.”

If you ask the same question to a room of relationship managers, the most common response is, “We don’t have the data to know what the right thing to say to customers at the right time.”

Thus, the key to engaging clients in a more relevant and captivating way lies in the ability of wealth management firms to extract value from the data they hold about their clients. Today, there is no shortage of quantity, relevance and quality of customer data, particularly due to the large amount captured during on-boarding and the data captured throughout the customer relationship.

The difficulty is that customer data collection systems are numerous and diverse and do not all of them go back to the company’s information system. The multitude of systems leads to inconsistencies that have a direct impact on customer satisfaction. The customer often finds himself providing the same information over and over again. In addition, all of the data collected is not used internally to enrich the customer relationship, due to the heterogeneity of the systems used.

Most large financial institutions have an advantage because they hold a wealth of customer data over many years, both structured and unstructured. So how can you get the most out of customer data? For private banks, there are 3 golden rules for choosing the right Intelligent Client Life Cycle Management solution:

1. Capturez les données une seule fois, d’une manière entièrement conforme, et les réutiliser à chaque étape du cycle de vie de la relation client. Cette solution permet d’éliminer les doublons et les demandes similaires faites au client. Elle contribue à préremplir les formulaires avec les données clients déjà fournies pour réduire l’impact administratif de la relation et personnaliser l’expérience client.
2. Veiller à ce que les données puissent être organisées, consultées, agrégées et analysées afin de fournir aux gestionnaires de la relation client une connaissance précise des besoins de leurs client et une vision 360° de la relation.
3. Tirer parti de l’IA pour fournir aux gestionnaires de la relation une analyse en temps réel des meilleures recommandations à fournir au client qui correspondent à ses objectifs personnels et ses demandes en matière d’investissement. L’ IA peut aussi être utilisé pour analyser les retours et sentiments clients suite aux échanges afin d’enrichir les modèles de recommandation. 

Ces règles sont difficiles (voire impossibles) à appliquer dans les organisations qui n’ont pas de vision holistique de leurs données et du cycle de vie de la relation. Pour atteindre cette vision intégrée de la relation, il s’agit de posséder une vision globale du cycle de vie des clients : suivi de la prospection, on-boarding, développement de la relation en passant par la gestion de la maturité de la relation client avec l’élargissement de la surface financière gérée en termes de solutions jusqu’au réengagement des clients. Une approche axée sur la technologie et une perspective de bout en bout de la relation sont essentielles pour orchestrer toutes les phases du cycle de vie du client et en assurer le succès, tout en contribuant à décloisonner les fonctionnements internes de la Banque. 

Dans un contexte de vieillissement du fonds de commerce de la clientèle de wealth management et de la baisse de la rentabilité, il est nécessaire d’agir rapidement. C’est un enjeu majeur que de passer d’une approche cloisonner de la relation pilotée avec des système éparses avec une gestion intégrée de la relation client. Il s’agit de s’appuyer sur l’unicité des données intégré dans une système de Life Cycle Management, enrichi par l’IA pour aider le conseiller de clientèle à agir au plus près des besoins clients. 

English translation:

How to equip relationship managers to know the right thing to say, at the right time

Much like Microsoft, many wealth management firms are passionate about empowering employees, engaging clients, and increasing process efficiency. Achieving excellence in these three pillars must be your goal if you are on a mission to drive down cost-income ratios, and grow revenues.

A significant factor in empowering relationship managers is the elimination of manual administrative tasks wherever possible, freeing time for more client-facing, revenue-generating work. Digital transformation is helping to achieve this goal for routine and repetitive tasks that have plagued relationship managers for many years. However, many wealth managers still have a long way to go to fully embrace new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has much to offer in terms of capturing, processing, and analysing vast quantities of data at high speed. This kind of automation and analysis at scale reveals actionable insights that will strengthen the advisor-client relationship in ways that are simply not possible otherwise.

If a roomful of banking CEOs were asked “What is the biggest problem for relationship managers?” most are likely to reply “Not saying the right thing to the client at the right time.”

Ask the same question of a roomful of relationship managers, and the typical answer would be “We don’t have the data to know what is the right thing to say to clients, at the right time.”

So, the key to engaging clients in a more intelligent and captivating way lies in your ability to extract value from the data you hold. Today, there is no shortage of high-quality data due to the vast quantity that is captured during onboarding. Sadly, however, once this rich data has met the identity verification requirements of compliance, it is often left to languish in systems that are unconnected to the rest of the business, and its true value is lost. In theory, large financial institutions have an advantage as they hold a wealth of client data spanning many years. However, they often find aggregation and analysis more challenging, as the combination of structured and unstructured data they hold resides in multiple, disparate systems.

As clients travel further on their journey with your firm they are often asked multiple times for the same data, simply because the data dots cannot be connected and company-wide visibility is not possible. Apart from the obvious inconvenience to clients, duplicate data is being stored in many different parts of your organisation, unnecessarily.

When dealing with data there are 3 rules that successful wealth managers live by:

1. Capture data once, in a fully compliant way, and re-use it at every stage of the client lifecycle to eliminate duplication, pre-populate forms to reduce administration, and personalise the client experience.
2. Ensure that data can be organised, accessed, aggregated, and analysed to provide relationship managers with accurate insights into clients’ needs and preferences.
3. Leverage AI to provide relationship managers with real-time analysis, and the intelligence to judge the sentiments of their clients and deliver timely next-best recommendations that match their investment goals and aspirations.

These rules are difficult (if not impossible) to apply in organisations that lack a holistic outlook and global vision. Still now, we see firms that view the various stages of the client lifecycle—from prospecting and onboarding through to client management, servicing, and re-engagement—as separate business functions that are unconnected and siloed. A technology-driven approach and end-to-end perspective is essential to orchestrate all phases of the client lifecycle and ensure success moving forward.

The gap between wealth management leaders and laggards is increasing over time. Firms that are failing to automate business-critical processes and empower relationship managers with data-driven insights presented in context, and in a form that they can easily interpret and act upon to engage clients, will find it harder to contain cost-income ratios and grow revenues in the future.