January 22, 2024
To capture a greater share of the growing wealth management market, leaders must embrace a bold, intentional use of technology and a full strategic roadmap for digital transformation.
Increasing numbers of affluent and lower high-net-worth (HNW) individuals are demanding modern experiences that combine superior digital offerings with a personalized touch. Navigating this changing landscape means leaning into transformation to fuel operational efficiency, ensure scalability and protect businesses from market uncertainty.
Forward-thinking wealth managers recognize the pivotal role technology plays in enabling customer-centricity, personalization and organizational agility. Investing strategically in technology capabilities and service models is key to developing customer loyalty and delivering memorable experiences.
As a result, there is growing pressure for wealth leaders to build tech stacks that unlock operational excellence alongside new product and service offerings.
Here are the technologies that should be on your radar as the wealth management market evolves:
Intelligent automation
Intelligent automation blends advanced cognitive technologies to streamline business operations.
In wealth management, it can support a wide range of functions, such as client onboarding, asset transfers, monitoring compliance and risk, conducting investment research, analyzing data and producing real-time investor reports from external platforms and communications.
This form of automation uses tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and optical character recognition (OCR). These technologies enable it to complete defined tasks, make informed decisions and adjust to changing business environments with little human involvement.
Cloud capabilities
Cloud services are user-friendly and quick to update, offering efficient data handling and the ability to adapt to changing client needs and industry trends.
The pandemic accelerated investment in cloud infrastructure, and the benefits to wealth management firms are huge. Cloud storage platforms significantly enhance data security and offer impressive cost savings, reducing the need for expensive data storage hardware.
These platforms also provide a range of subscription models allowing firms to choose and adjust Software as a Service (SaaS) options to match changing business needs. What’s more, cloud computing is highly scalable, offering almost limitless computing and storage capabilities.
We anticipate adoption of cloud services will continue to gather pace in the wealth management market over the coming year.
Advanced analytics and big data
Advanced analytics combined with large datasets, help wealth managers understand customer behavior, improve efficiency and provide truly tailored services.
This includes predictive analytics for forecasting trends and prescriptive analytics for optimizing outcomes, helping wealth managers understand and anticipate client needs.
Big data technologies support the storage, processing and analysis of extensive datasets, enabling precise client segmentation and investment strategies that align with individual preferences and goals. These technologies are also becoming increasingly important for regulatory compliance, using automated compliance checks to manage large volumes of data and keep wealth management practices up to date with regulatory standards.
Generative AI
Generative AI (GenAI) has been making headlines for over a year, promising to transform how work gets done.
In wealth management, it unlocks exciting possibilities, such as improving data sharing and reducing reliance on offshore resources. GenAI significantly enhances a firm's ability to quickly review client portfolios and recommend investments tailored to individual risk tolerances, financial goals and personal values.
It's capable of gathering and analyzing data on companies, reading and summarizing quarterly reports, executing trades, maintaining records and creating initial drafts of tax and regulatory reports.
This technology can also act as a powerful customer segmentation tool, helping to personalize marketing efforts and communications. GenAI can also power chatbot tools by answering client questions and helping to redirect enquiries to the right place.
One exciting possibility of AI in large wealth management businesses is to break operational siloes, bringing together data from every corner of a company to generate new insights and ideas.
As technology moves faster and faster, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of options in the market. But building future-ready tech stack solutions in wealth management is no longer optional — it's essential for staying competitive in a rapidly evolving sector.
Embracing these technologies means not only adapting to current market demands but also being prepared for whatever the future may hold.
How to get started
We help you to make better strategic technology decisions:
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Align your technical roadmap and strategy. Close the gap between innovative thinking and results. Our experts can empower you to build a pathway to success.
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Focus on parallel priorities. Invest in interconnected capabilities to appease your tech anxiety — for example, high-priority areas like AI and machine learning can benefit from simultaneous investment in cyber security.
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Keep learning. You can find everything we have published about these technologies in our content hub.
