How Account Aggregation Helps Bank and Trust Organizations Grow

While all firms would like to see their trust and wealth management business grow, we know from experience that taking care of our current client relationships has to be the number one priority—and sometimes, that can get in the way of business growth.  

But business growth and client relationships don’t need to be opposing objectives.

What often goes unnoticed is how much growth opportunity is available from existing clients. Many organizations may not realize that hitting growth goals should involve catering to and improving the experience for existing clients just as much, if not more so, as pursuing brand-new prospects.

There are two primary ways that organizations can analyze the opportunities available to them.

The first is to collect and analyze the data they already have on existing clients to identify trends and better understand their needs, as well as accurately judge the performance of trust officers and advisors. The second is to collect even more data through account aggregation services.

Understanding how the big data can be used in small, personal ways to craft the client experience can lead to a higher value to the individuals who use the organization’s services and using account aggregation-as-a-service can be an efficient means for the organization to deliver.

Over the rest of this article, we’ll look at how firms can use these tools to adapt and grow with current customers and prospects alike, including the ways Wealth Access supports both endeavors.

Find New Opportunities and Adapt to Change with Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence can be broadly defined as any way in which a firm uses the data it collects on its clients and employees to identify trends and insights, and then use those insights to create positive change within the company.

Business Intelligence isn’t accomplished inside a spreadsheet. For most firms, it involves a robust set of tools that collect and parse all of those points of information, automatically.

In the case of Wealth Access, we offer Firm Insight as an included service for banking and trust organizations.

Firm Insight takes all the data stored in Wealth Access and puts it at a user’s fingertips to help organizations create more informed business decisions and set a more realistic path forward when setting growth goals.

A sampling of some of the information that firms can take advantage of when using this Business Intelligence tool includes:

• Views into client usage, adoption and satisfaction
• Production of advisors or trust officers
• Real-time business information such as Assets Under Management and number of accounts aggregated from various sources

These top-down insights don’t stop at a high-level review. Each item can be analyzed further at deeper and deeper levels.

What can you do with this information once you have it?

For trust departments, being able to objectively evaluate trust officer performance can drive meaningful conversions and help set tangible goals for each employee.

If a certain rep’s book of business is growing at a slower pace than the other members on the team, business intelligence data can help an organization easily and quickly understand why. Is it due to a lack of nurturing on their part, or less quality leads?

What’s more, this kind of data oversight can help drive competition between officers. When done in a healthy way, competition can help firms set higher goals and drive comradery, rather than division, between team members.

Utilize Aggregation-as-a-Service to Improve Client Engagement

Account aggregation helps firms increase profitability by helping them uncover opportunities to bring held-away assets under management, in a way that adds value to a client’s financial plan and goals.

When you look at the numbers, it’s a fact that firms who provide account aggregation are more profitable than those that don’t. A study of Wealth Access clients found that firms who deploy account aggregation experience an increase of $2,000 in annual revenue per client.

When viewed as an additional service you provide, account aggregation helps to create another layer of value for clients and a differentiator of your technology offering for prospects.

When account aggregation is available inside an organization’s online client portal, it gives clients a single place to log in and view the entirety of their investments and get a full picture of all their finances.

This ease-of-use helps to create goodwill among clients, as well as helping to prioritize an organization’s portal as the client’s primary financial site over other options, like a custodian website or consumer-focused personal financial management applications.

And for trust officers and wealth managers, account aggregation offers more insight into an individual’s finances. That additional insight can lead to more personal advice that creates better conversations and builds a higher level of trust.

It’s also important to recognize that account aggregation is the new normal among personal financial management platforms geared to consumers. If your bank or trust department doesn’t offer it for clients, you are more than doing a disservice to your own ability to uncover new opportunities, you are also withholding a valuable part of the client experience that’s now expected.

Account aggregation also plays a direct role in the quality of business intelligence data.

When an organization employs account aggregation and collects that data within Wealth Access, it creates a more robust data set available for analysis within Firm Insight, and the knowledge gained from analyzing that data becomes more complete and useful.

Of course, providing account aggregation on a large scale can be challenging for any department.

If your firm implements a technology-only aggregation solution, your daily operations and client support teams can become overwhelmed with these non-core functions.

At Wealth Access, we developed an Aggregation-as-a-Service solution to guard against that kind of stress on your internal teams. We combine our aggregation technology with outsourced aggregation operations and direct end-client support to better enable trust and wealth management departments to deliver robust aggregation capabilities to their clients.

The Combined Power of Account Aggregation and Business Intelligence

Utilizing account aggregation to collect more financial data helps organizations to understand their customers better and win new clients with more customized service that’s more unique to each personal situation.

When paired with the insights gained through business intelligence, organizations have all the tools necessary to adapt to an ever-changing competitive landscape and grow, both from external leads as well as internal opportunities that might otherwise be hidden.

Ready to see how your firm can win the trust of clients with account aggregation and business intelligence? Click here to schedule a demo of Wealth Access and learn how to confidently grow your firm.