With clients forced to adapt to a pandemic over the past year, wealth managers have learned lessons that will carry over into the return to normalcy.
In a panel at Financial Planning’s
At AllianceBernstein, Global Head of Business Transformation Koley Corte says the lasting takeaway for her firm is speed.
“We've been able to make decisions really quickly,” Corte says. “We've been able to approve things differently to consider some of the corporate frameworks that we would normally bring to bear differently ... Listening to the customer, adapting our model and moving quickly are things that I think we knew we needed to do, we accelerated in this period and I think we need to keep in place.”
Advisors and firms eager to retain clients’ children and grandchildren in the case of an inheritance have also embraced remote group meetings, according to Schoenberger.
“This is something we actually hear a lot from financial advisors, that they are going to have a better time working with multi-generational families now over Zoom, because it's important to get people who don't physically live in the same place,” she says. “And if the kids live in one place, the grandkids live in another place. They may never have met grandma and grandpa's financial advisor.”
Edward Jones has embarked on a “
In addition, the firm rolled out a mobile app in the past year that has attracted nearly a million users and a new version of its website that has more than 3.5 million active users, Toolan says, calling it an “understatement” to suggest the firm has a treasure trove of data informing its tech. Edward Jones has 15 other pilots in the works at its 15,000 branches studying how to leverage its relationships with product manufacturers and fintech vendors.
“I'm fond of the quote that, ‘A client's last great experience anywhere is their new expectation for service everywhere,’” Toolan says. “It doesn't matter if it's a GrubHub experience or an Uber experience or whatever it is that they're using. Like, ‘Wow, this technology worked really well. And that excited me, that engaged me.’”
With major clients like JPMorgan Chase, TD Bank and Manulife Bank, Kasisto has been helping institutions create digital assistants that give clients the ability to navigate the firms’ massive numbers of services and products more easily, says Senior Vice President Stefan Savov. Kasisto aims to remove “the complexity of search and navigation” from the equation with the artificial intelligence-powered digital tools, Savov says.
“We're thinking of it as an unchanneled experience — this is equally useful and valuable on the web, on voice, on mobile,” he says. “Just enable folks in a very simple manner to say, ‘This is what I'm trying to accomplish, do it for me.’ That's a key tenet for us when it comes to effective digital sales service.”
