It has been almost ten years since early B2C Robo advisers launched their products. Since then, the market has seen exponential growth. Incumbents such as Blackrock, UBS, Vanguard and Charles Schwab have entered the space with their Robo advisory models. With this increased competition in effect, it is the end-customer who has benefited from transparent and low cost investing.
Robo advisers started to help firms serve clients who were previously ignored. Clients with low investable assets were typically not being served because of the high cost associated with the financial advice process. But now things have taken a positive turn. Employing Robo advisers, firms are now able to extend their services to a broader range of clients, including first-time investors and mass affluent customers. Also, surprisingly, recent studies show that much of the Robo adviser customer base has higher income and asset levels.
Retail investors now have access to customised portfolios. All they have to do is answer a few questions designed to gauge their risk profile and to make an estimation of their timeline. Firms are using the technology and automation to commoditise processes and for providing more sophisticated alternatives compared to what traditional wealth management firms offer. Clients are benefiting from the greater transparency, lower cost, more comprehensive range of financial products and better services across multiple channels.
Going beyond just serving client’s needs, Robo advisers help firms, and financial advisers understand how their clients are reacting to the customer journey and market trends. This directly allows them to communicate with their clients in a much more effective fashion.
With Digital Wealth Software, firms will have data on how their clients are reacting across multiple touchpoints – starting from the time they visit their website going on to onboarding, investing and tracking. This data is in addition to vast amounts of existing data that includes demographics, spending patterns as well as branch banking information. Unfortunately, the data and processes in most firms are traditionally organised in silos. A case in point is when information collected on the website and from in-person branch banking gets stored on two different servers. To achieve efficiency, firms need technology and systems which are integrated, flexible and scalable. This plays a vital role in helping the firms in pattern identification and serves customers using an omnichannel methodology.
Data and analytics on your customer base being the new oil, firms must be able to capitalise on this. Newsfeed by Facebook has come a long way in delivering posts relevant to a user’s interest. On a similar scale, Google search has reached a sophistication level where users do not even have to finish typing a query. Thus naturally, customers have started to expect similar personalised recommendations from Financial Institutions.
Delivering such solutions needs an innovative and agile approach – a Modular API based approach. Modular APIs with a Unified data platform provide a base structure that connects to the original platform designed to easily incorporate new features or remove existing features without overhauling current systems. These platforms will fundamentally transform the way Financial Institutions approach technology. These will help them solve technical problems, identify customer trends and go to market faster.
At WealthObjects, we have a fully integrated modular API based platform, with superior automation technologies, helping firms launch any business model with a faster time to the market. Today, a firm might want to launch a purely digital B2C Robo advisory proposition, and tomorrow there may be a requirement to transform this into a Hybrid model with human advisers. Our platform seamlessly integrates into existing systems, and firms can easily add or remove features or any financial products to suit their needs.
Our digital wealth management software definitively reduces unnecessary operational and technical costs. It allows firms to increase productivity and agility and maintain their focus on clients, not solely on products. Firms get the leverage to concentrate on the speed to market, build products for a multi-channel environment and redefine how value is delivered to the customer.
– Team WealthObjects