Why Do Bank Wealth Managers Reach So Few Bank Customers?

Math teaches us that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Is your bank missing out on the shortest distance to its next client – the prospect who is already onboard as a bank-related retail or institutional customer?

While your firm navigates the global pandemic, a lack of technological integration and digital capabilities may be slowing down your wealth management business growth. It is still critical for you to effectively and efficiently respond to shifting regulatory demands, investor behaviors and technology preferences just like other investment advisory firms. How do you balance it all? Bank executives often cite three primary reasons for underserving their bank customers’ wealth management.

• Legacy systems past their prime: Too many cumbersome systems and processes still litter the bank wealth management landscape. The result: wealth management advisors struggle with cumbersome manual processes and paperwork, robbing them of the time needed to develop and grow their businesses. According to a recent Broadridge survey of North American advisors, most advisors say that paperwork is the worst part of their job and they could better serve their clients’ investment needs if they had better tech tools.¹
• Underwhelming advisory capabilities: Relationships don’t have to be a lost art for financial institutions during the COVID-19 era. Yet, many bank wealth managers characterize their expertise and investment capabilities as substandard or “me-too” offerings. Without sufficient differentiation or added value, they are unable to make a persuasive case to prospects for transitioning their assets from their external, siloed wealth management relationship to a consolidation strategy that brings all of their accounts together on a single platform and under a single bank or trust department umbrella.
• Missing: digital lower minimum solutions: Millennials have already surpassed baby boomers in numbers. Eventually, they will surpass them in assets under management as they receive their growing share of $70 trillion in assets from baby boomer parents. Banks that fall behind in reaching out to Next Gen clients through their preferred means of digital communications – digital investment platforms that allow clients to self-service, incorporate light planning and goals-based scenarios, video chats, texts, and social media – are at risk of losing a valuable client demographic.

With volatile market conditions and record low interest rates, is a continued focus on your wealth management business as a source of reoccurring non-interest revenue a viable path for your firm? We believe that in order to be successful in this environment, banks will need to evolve their technology and advisory platforms to provide a more unified and flexible advisory offering. It’s encouraging however to see that bank and trust executives cite that gaining efficiencies “through technology and implementing digital capabilities as top strategic priorities in 2020,” according to findings from The Cerulli Report U.S. Private Banks & Trust Companies 2020 Unifying the Wealth Management Experience.²

Looking beyond the portfolio

Reframing client engagement from simply being a portfolio management-centric to an advice- and planning-centric engagement is also critical to growth. Technology that can efficiently enable these interactions, while freeing up time for advisors to engage clients in new ways, will facilitate this evolution. By combining modern cloud-based systems with the strategic outsourcing of non-essential, low value-add functions, bank wealth managers can draw a straight line toward building a lasting scalable platform for the future. To discover more about modernizing your wealth management business to scale through today’s pandemic-haunted world and beyond, download A Bank Wealth Management Executive’s Guide to Platform Technology Strategy in the 2020s today.

¹Current wealth technology tools not meeting financial advisor expectations, Broadridge https://www.broadridge.com/ca/report/financial-advisor-survey

²The Cerulli Report U.S. Private Banks & Trust Companies 2020 Unifying the Wealth Management Experience P 20