Video: The Wealth Management Digitalisation Journey

Welcome to the third video in a new series of interviews with Antony Bream, MD – UK and Americas at Wealth Dynamix by our friends at Wealth Mosaic.

In this edition Antony provides his views on

• Where the wealth management is on it’s digitisation journey
• What other industries wealth managers should at look to define digital experience

Video transcript

Where is wealth management on it’s digitisation journey and where do you see an impact?

There’s some areas of improvement. There’s no doubt that the demand in the market is as a client of an investment manager, a wealth manager, I want to have access to my portfolio, my holdings on a phone, on my app. I want to be able to contact my advisor on the road through secure web chat, through a phone call, a meeting.

So I think we’re seeing parts of it being digitised, but not the full lifecycle and I think if you don’t digitise the full lifecycle all you’re doing is maybe putting a little bit of panache on one part of the business – and possibly you’re moving problems elsewhere. If you look at onboarding for example, that’s the first experience a client will have with the firm that they are being onboarded by.

Now, we’re working with one of our customers. They had something like a 25-plus day onboarding timescale. By using our technology they’re now doing that on the same day that the client wants to onboard. That’s a significant saving, huge amount of money saving – about £1m a year for that client just by reducing their onboarding time.

So you’ve got to have digital touch points throughout the whole of the journey from sales prospecting to onboarding to the ongoing management. That’s really critical. You can’t just have it in tactical or small parts of that whole process. It’s got to cover the whole lifecycle because the client wants a consistent experience. They want it to be fast, efficient, seamless and consistent.

What other industries should we look at to define digital experience?

I think day to day we all use apps. Whether it’s Uber, whether it’s Babylon Health, whether it’s a hotel concierge app, we all get a really good customer experience. We’ve got to the point now where our phone is our office. It’s our organising mechanism. It’s the thing that we communicate with our friends, our colleagues now as well, our clients even.

So I’d say travel. EasyJet, you walk into the airport, they tell how far your gate is until you’re boarding. They make the whole customer journey valuable. They give you value add. Those sorts of apps are bringing me value and I want that value. I want to use the EasyJet app as a centre point to get all of the things that I need for my journey.

Babylon Health, probably one that really stands out from the crowd. They are now doing remote diagnosis of people, accessing doctor’s and consultants from around the world, and they’re giving remote diagnosis of people’s conditions using the phone.