Digital Transformation: What can it mean for your business?

Technology is intertwined with nearly every aspect of our lives – from shopping to travel to entertainment. Over the past two years, technology has become even more of a lifeline for maintaining relationships via digital communication tools, and an industry that has experienced one of the largest accelerations in digital adoption has been the financial services industry.

Even as human interactions begin to normalise again, the financial services industry has shown a broad recognition of the sustaining value of digital communication and, more broadly, digital transformation. But how can this be done to deliver the maximum benefit to firms, particularly in the wealth management segment?

Any great advisor knows the importance of strong digital communication as well as robust digital planning to enable their clients to meet their financial goals. This has always been a winning combination for great relationships. But client demands are changing.

There’s an expectation for more on-demand access to information and more digitally enabled communication – at speed. As advisors look to fulfil these changing demands, they need to find the right technology solutions that will maximise efficiency and free up advisor time to focus on delivering exceptional service to their clients and growing their business.

Overcoming an outdated approach to technology

Historically, digital adoption has been piecemeal among advisor firms. One system is used for one task, another (often with a different login) required for another set of tasks. Using point solutions from different vendors, with different data systems, creates a disjointed patchwork of technologies that are hard to integrate and time-consuming to use.

Not to mention, these systems are all hard-coded – which means they’re expensive to maintain and near impossible to change. As such, these point solutions typically require huge in-house support teams – an additional inefficiency.

With disparate systems comes disparate data. If there is no integrated data system, client data is hard to find, and advisors have to bridge these technical challenges by deploying manual workarounds. They are required to fill gaps in systems that are not integrated or fit for purpose, leading to rampant use of side processes like Excel spreadsheets.

In some cases, this results in advisors looking at different information to their clients, or  the back office looking at conflicting data to the front office. Operational efficiency and often the quality of client communication and planning suffer when this is the case.

To realise true digital transformation that meets elevated client needs, it’s time to change the approach, and ultimately reap the efficiency and scale benefits technology can bring.

The benefits of digital transformation

For the advisor, digital transformation is key to expanding into new relationships and deepening existing ones. With carefully designed workflows, digital tools accelerate the speed at which advisors can serve clients – freeing them up from non-revenue generating tasks and allowing them to focus on growth and retention.

As advisor demographics change and competition for talent increases, technology is also becoming central to attracting and retaining advisors – right alongside compensation and ownership. No one wants to work at a firm that has outmoded technology. Top-tier talent knows that inefficient systems hinder their ability to do great work, whereas great technology catalyses client retention, client growth and operational efficiency.

Meanwhile, for the client, expectations and demands have changed. They need empathetic tools with intuitive design – matching digital experiences from other areas of their personal and professional lives. All five generations of investors seek digital channels to engage with their money and their advisor, on their terms. To meet these expectations and deliver a premium service, it is important technology provides custom experiences, attuned to their unique needs and preferences.

The digital experience should be optimised and refined for an unlimited number of personas and equally engaging on mobile or desktop, to ensure they can access a holistic view of their wealth and financial wellbeing from anywhere, at any time, in exactly the way they want it. This drives engagement and loyalty, which translates to retention and increased share of wallet.

Where to start?

The industry has only just started to harness the many benefits of digital transformation, often because firms don’t know where to start or feel the need to create solutions themselves. What they really need is a different approach to digital, and to find a technology partner who can deliver on digital transformation.

InvestCloud has achieved the ability to help firms transform digitally through several key innovations – we have long recognised the need to create an approach to digital that would allow the industry to transform.

At the core of our difference is our Digital Warehouse, a cloud-native single data warehouse, that can integrate disparate data sources – overlaying existing data sources, consolidating them into one place – for a single version of the integrated truth.

In addition, in contrast to hard-coded point solutions, InvestCloud generates code using iProgram, which is an AI-enabled code generator enabling a business analyst or designer to do the work of 50 programmers. User experiences are generated based on a design-led approach that also utilises behavioural science, including gaming theory, decision theory and also data science for further optimisation.

The power of this digital platform has allowed InvestCloud to create over 300 hyper-modular apps, each offering complementary functionality, which means firms can cover significant ground without having to go to multiple vendors. And all of this is offered securely and at scale via the cloud.

Digital transformation is no longer nice to have – it’s obligatory. But anything less than well- designed, engaging and efficient digital offerings are missing the mark. Done right, digital tools can be leveraged to enhance and elevate the advisor-client relationship, and ultimately improve client retention, client growth and operational efficiency.

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