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Entrusting a third party to manage savings, a portfolio, and provide the investment advice that will create a solid financial future takes a huge leap of faith.
Typically, clients are looking for a wealth management service that is personable, relevant, accessible and not just on top of its game, but three steps ahead, best-in-class making the best returns with minimal fuss and fees.
Pre-digitization, there was the inaugural meeting between advisor and client with goal setting, fee outlining, contract signing followed by paper updates, occasional and ad hoc phone calls and the annual update. The wealth manager was busy. Researching, networking, allocating, administrating with many clients’ best interests at heart. Success was the ambition, with margins for error factored in and unfortunate judgement calls forgiven and accepted as part of the wealth management culture. Portfolios were discussed using past performance as a guide and client expectations reset.
That approach to wealth management was exhausting and now prehistoric with active managers now accelerating decisions utilising technology, harvesting intelligence from multiple sources about multiple asset classes, distilling information and apportioning appropriate recommendations to clients on a case-by-case, goal-by-goal basis.
Active management still involves time, fees and the unconscious bias that determines investment and instrument selection, and the when or how to invest or exit. It requires skill. It requires even more energy.
Passive and the predictable
The passive investment model shares some of the above. Portfolio management results in less fatigue. Artificial intelligence takes the proverbial strain by, for example, tracking indexes automatically with the goal of matching the indexes’ performance. It is a predictable methodology with investments bought and held through the good times and the bad; the amount of buying and selling is minimal and the fees charged are reduced.
With accelerating digitization, the pace of market demand, asset proliferation and increasing regulations within the wealth management industry, all of the above makes for uncomfortable reading as both active and passive approaches put the client in observer role with little or no interaction.
Whilst there’s trust and skill being deployed, there’s very little synergy between manager, portfolio and an increasingly well-informed client.
In this communication culture of social media, open banking, online education, and application programming interfaces it’s not just the millennial clients that are more computer and financial savvy. All generations expect wealth management services to be energetic, bespoke, better informed, ahead of the investment curve and immediate.
The platform created by Comarch has been developed to be just that. Dynamic, instinctive, driven by data, and underpinned by compliance it encourages manager and client not just to get AI friendly, but become AI practitioners that enjoy and profit from a hybrid model that removes frustration and fatigue by providing solutions and portfolio metrics in real time.
Empowering digital solutions
Whilst artificial intelligence is accessible 24/7, the wealth manager isn’t.
The ping ponging of missed phone calls and out-of-office email bounce backs between client and hard-to-reach advisors has been eradicated by the Comarch Wealth Management system. The cloud native model allows clients immediate access to advisor calendars to schedule meetings online to discuss investment ideas and portfolio recalibration.
The system also assists managers to empower clients to have stewardship of their portfolio by providing a bird’s eye view of their investments on a fully compliant, transparent platform. It removes client co-dependency, and a blended personal robo-advisory service enhances the wealth manager-client experience.
Clients wanting ‘customised’ have choice. The system allows investment advisory or discretionary portfolio management, and the aforementioned hybrid or fully automated robo-advisory solutions conducted with the help of AI engines which adapt, blend or assist the architecture of both client and wealth manager mandates and business models.
Traditional, personal way of maintaining the manager-client relationship are supported, clients are helped to become more financially astute and disciplined and able to respond to notifications and understand the protocols that result in automated rebalancing.
The Comarch Wealth Management system allows wealth managers to work symbiotically with data which provides clients a purer, personalised and bespoke service which is regulated and country-specific. More head time is provided for managers globally as the robo-advisory solution is always in line with each institutions’ investment constraints and compliance rules and entire processes are documented and archived for both internal audit purposes and client or regulatory reporting needs.
Hybrid solutions allow head space, with human and process fatigue eradicated and client and managers on the same platform and on the same wavelength as they collaborate on capital returns.