In the fast-paced world of financial services, change is inevitable.
Maintaining flexibility in your business model is critical for ongoing success. Unfortunately, too many banks and trust departments struggle to operate in as efficient or flexible manner as possible because of the technology powering their client data.
Many enterprise-level firms operate with technology that’s not nimble enough to survive the expectations of clients and employees alike who both expect a fast-paced, modern, and mobile experience.
At Wealth Access, we’re focused on delivering technology that can enable you to improve the customer experience, and create happier people internally too.
In today’s article, we’ll look at how improving the technology you use in your organization can improve internal efficiency, and also influence the experience of your clients for the better.
Many financial institutions offer an array of specialty services to meet the many needs of their customers—from personal banking, to loans, to investments, the options run the entire breadth of financial services.
Bank-affiliated wealth management practices may include a retail bank, a private bank, brokerage accounts, trust accounts, advisory services, retirement accounts, insurance policy selection, and even more services.
Unfortunately, what typically ends up happening is that each of those services gets supported by a different back-end software system—introducing complexity when managing client relationships.
In these cases, clients are often presented with multiple on-line access portals with multiple IDs and passwords, just so they can see all the different accounts they have with one firm.
For internal employees, it’s even worse. Not only do they need to log into various systems, they have to know how to operate within them to accomplish the many tasks they have each day.
Operating in this way is frustrating for clients, but it’s even more inefficient and frustrating for employees.
For the banks and trust companies that work with Wealth Access, we can provide a single, comprehensive mobile and digital client experience for all the relationships your client has with your firm. One portal with one log in under your firm’s brand.
And just as important to help to create internal efficiencies, Wealth Access also consolidates all client data from the various departments within an organization, creating a single advisor-facing view for relationship managers.
This consolidated technology experience provides internal advisors and relationship managers with a comprehensive understanding of all the client’s relationships with the firm without needing to jump between applications and seeing one piece at a time.
A consolidated approach in turn provides a much better and more easily understood client experience that helps to reinforce the value of a financial advisor and a multi-faceted financial services provider.
The conversion of a major back-office system is a large and complicated undertaking for any institution.
Managing your team through a technology change can be difficult, but managing your clients through change can be a damaging business event if not done well. This is especially true for changes to back-office systems where clients may not see an immediate benefit.
When you change technology systems it may impact your clients and a whole host of problems can occur if not properly managed. Client communication and training as well as relationship management around the timing of changes can create additional complexities in an already complex process.
By separating the client experience from the back-office technology, however, you can reduce one major component of the conversion planning and execution—client change management—and protect your clients from any back-office system changes.
Typically, most back-office platforms also offer some form of client-facing experience, and so it’s been easy for bank and trust organizations to use them with clients. However, when your company “owns” your client experience, you can do away with many of the concerns brought on by a back-office technology shift.
Here’s the good news: With Wealth Access, you control the client experience. By providing a comprehensive experience that aggregates and normalizes all the data you’re using across various back-end platforms, changes you make to any one component does not have to affect your client and how they interact with you.
You can maintain your data however you like; the visuals and the engagement for the client don’t change.
Ultimately, the technology that you deploy within your organization that gets used by clients will play a critical role in how a brand is perceived.
Technology that makes it easy for clients to get what they want, when they want it, will drive higher loyalty and the adoption of that technology among clients will also increase. As adoption grows higher, clients naturally become more comfortable interacting with your firm and looking to you for their financial needs.
One way to create a comprehensive client experience is through data aggregation that is fully integrated with financial planning. Through Wealth Access, you can integrate many financial planning tools that will give clients insight into progress toward their goals, and we offer connections to more than 20,000 financial institutions so you can bring together the outside and held away account information that clients want to see under one login.
The client experience directly influences productivity of a relationship manager. Clients who are given more ways to positively engage with you can ultimately lead to better relationships, because your advisor or relationship managers can get to know them better through their own consolidated view of their finances.
Across every level or your organization, a consolidated technology and client experience provides more ways to win.Ready to see how your firm can improve its client experience and operational efficiencies by upgrading to Wealth Access? Click here to schedule a demo and learn how to take client change management off your list of worries.