Banks are amongst the oldest financial institutions in the country. Their clients view them as the trusted protectors of their assets. But while their reputations as trusted custodians of deposits are solid, their reputations as innovative wealth advisors and digital experience leaders lag behind independent advisory firms and innovative fintech firms. Banks have the biggest opportunity to provide holistic wealth management experiences of any sector of the wealth management industry. But to do so requires they understand the full slate of benefits and how to leverage the best of their brand and reputation while innovating their technology offerings (to their clients and their employees) and their investment capabilities to capture more of their overall client base. They must also carefully balance moving fast and offering more integrated experiences with staying true to their roots as a trusted and stable client partner.
How Can Banks Modernize their Experiences while Protecting their Valuable Legacy Brand?
Many banks are in the envious position of sitting on decades of strong brand identity and have loyal customers. Using that benefit while simultaneously upgrading to innovative experiences is both critical and challenging. That is why bank leadership must understand its value proposition and how it makes them unique when creating new experiences
- Why do clients trust them?
- How do they engage with the bank on a daily, weekly, monthly, and ad hoc basis?
- What makes their relationship sticky?
Understanding those critical data points will help leaders protect important brand elements as they make decisions around modern investment and wealth management operations and experiences and implement the right technology tool to develop them. Overall, banks should seek to deliver consistent, stable, and accurate experiences on a trusted and secure platform.
How Can Banks Work Toward an Ideal State?
Once the value proposition is clearly understood, start at the end and develop a vision of the desired outcome. What does an ideal end state look like that can deliver integrated experiences to your clients, and efficient and scalable operations to your advisors and support teams, while integrating with the broader technology ecosystem of the bank? Defining that ideal state is a challenge. It requires insights and experience. At a minimum, organizations need to have the following insights:
- A vision of the business model and future state that you want combined with an understanding and experience in the current state of your technology.
- A data strategy that delivers a view of where client data is created and managed, how advisory and investment data is stored, and how to account for relationships.
- A plan to get from the current state to the ideal future state while continuing to operate your day-to-day business.
- Real world experience of how other organizations have modernized, expanded, and integrated their tech stacks, and insight into what is working and what is not.
What Are Potential Pitfalls Banks Often Encounter
There are a few common challenges we see organizations encounter when taking on large technology projects, but every challenge can be overcome.
The first is existing staff capacity. As mentioned above, banks must do the work of modernization while maintaining their day-to-day operations. This requires a lot of expert personnel to accomplish. Often, augmenting existing staff with outside experts can alleviate pressure on the internal team.
Another common issue is documentation and thoughtful design of workflows and controls. Document how you do things today and how you want to do it in the future. Think beyond the “we’ve always done it this way so we’ll just keep doing it” mentality. When moving to a new platform, accept the changes in efficiencies that come with it instead of trying to do the same thing on a new platform.
Because banks are often older established institutions, they tend to get bogged down with their legacy technology and slow processes that limit or slow change. A strong change management strategy that includes comprehensive planning, execution, and communications will help you get beyond long held policies.
Finally, we often support organizations working from an incomplete current state assessment. Taking the time to consolidate a thorough assessment improves decision making and uncovers more opportunities for technology to provide a better client experience.
What Does the Right Technology Investment Mean for Banks?
Banks have enormous potential to provide an elevated client experience and drive growth to their wealth management services by modernizing the right technologies in their stack. With thoughtful planning and documentation, along with adding expert staff as needed, these organizations can invest appropriately in their growth and enhance the value of their brands.
Learn more about how we help banks modernize their experiences.
