Digitizing Wealth Management: How To Create the Best Customer Experience

The last 24 months have overturned nearly all the systems and certainties wealth managers previously held regarding customer experience. With intense competition, shaky investor confidence, and challenging client retention trends, digitized wealth management services have become indispensable for customer engagement. 

What is digital wealth management?

As advancements in wealth management technology accelerate, it’s up to financial advisors to adjust the way they engage with clients. These tools come with new opportunities to provide a superior customer experience and deliver deeper insights into your customer’s financial goals. Digitizing financial services meets your customers where they are — online. It helps wealth managers deliver a competitive advantage in an increasingly uniform market. 

Improving communications with wealth management technology

Wealth management has always been an industry where a personal touch builds more trusting client-to-advisor relationships. But as face-to-face meetings have become fewer and further between, financial advisors have sought to keep their personal touch while still meeting their clients where they are — and many are finding that virtual communication doesn’t have to be impersonal. 

This personal connection can start with providing advanced hybrid engagement tools that allow clients to meet with an advisor online. These seamless digital experiences with certified financial planners, whether via videoconferences, online chat services or over the phone, give your clients convenient access to near round-the-clock financial support.

As consumers have indicated, they increasingly prefer a digital-led communication model, especially among millennial investors. Today, clients continue to prioritize convenience and frequency of communication as the new normal.

‍Empowering client decision-making with virtual tools

Just as client-to-advisor communication has become digitized, so have many of the services that firms offer. Providing clients with online tools and data, such as digital education services or self-service portals, improves their financial literacy and empowers their decision-making and reduces cost-to-serve. Customers now expect their data, portfolio and reports to be at their fingertips — anytime, anywhere.

Likewise, hybrid-engagement tools allow financial advisors to meet with clients digitally and help perform services customers cannot execute on their own. It’s essential for wealth management companies to enable a completely digital journey for their customers. This includes digital document signing and online notarizations. 

Having a tool in your wealth management technology arsenal like the Notarize platform gives your clients the option to complete transactions 100% online. With Notarize, notaries are available 24/7 via computer, tablet or smartphone, effectively helping your clients to easily complete document execution in minutes — a process that previously could have taken days or even weeks.‍

Harnessing customer data like never before

As clients have shifted to preferring wealth management technology as part of the investment experience, they have also become more open to sharing personal data with their financial advisors. Digitized services put financial advisors in a strong position of trust and transparency with their clients, leading many to engage in a data-driven financial plan tailored to their investment goals and ambitions. 

Understanding clients’ goals, behaviors, and preferences help establish a more personalized approach to customer engagement. Firms with a strong digital presence can access their client’s log-in frequency, trade activity and meeting requests, all of which can be analyzed to develop strategies to target client goals. 

In some cases, customers are only willing to share their data if it appears the process results in a positive outcome for their portfolio. A clear and transparent data strategy is the key to building trust and achieving personal objectives with clients, especially when it translates into solid portfolio performance.

Digitized processes create tailor-made experiences 

Implementing wealth management technology into existing systems is a marathon, not a sprint. While customers expect virtual communication, digital document execution and data-driven investing, firms need to implement the right tools into their system rather than onboarding every shiny, new financial tool. 

In many ways, the investor base is more demanding than ever before. But smart wealth management companies understand that creating a customer-first, digital experience that still provides a personal touch (albeit virtually) will provide their firm with a competitive advantage.