In today’s day and age, most consumers interact with their service providers — across many different industries such as retail, telecommunications and even healthcare — through digital touch points. You can access your phone company’s online customer portal to manage your account, reach out to the company on Twitter to ask for help and easily chat with a customer service rep through their website. This is how the modern consumer interacts with their service provider, and that means investors are looking for this type of personal, digital client engagement too.
Simply put, investors are expecting high-quality digital interactions from their money managers because they expect that from every other service provider they interact with.
To put it in perspective (and numbers), here are eight impressive stats that support how important digital interactions are to the clients of the wealth management industry.
- According to research by Findawealthmanager.com, the online matching service found that 69% of survey respondents preferred digital interaction, with email and web portals the most popular formats for 40% and 23% of respondents, respectively. (Wealth Manager, April 2015)
- A Deutsche Bank study found that more than 33% of all new banking business with customers between the ages of 16 and 39 is conducted fully on the Web. (PwC, 2013).
- From the Wealth Report 2014, almost 2/3 (65%) of HNWIs expect to run most or all of their wealth management relationships digitally in 5 years. (Capgemini, June 2014)
- In Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), 83% of HNWIs would consider leaving firms that lack an integrated digital channel experience. (Capgemini, June 2014)
- Futurewealth Report found that 92% of the wealthiest respondents believe that digital communication technologies will help them expand their wealth within the next five years. (The Trusted Family Blog, November 2013)
- More than 80% of the affluent/high-net-worth individuals worldwide use apps or mobile websites for financial matters. (My Private Banking Research, 2014)
- More than 40% of clients are looking for investment functions such as tailored recommendations and portfolio analysis via tablets or smartphones, but less than 20% of banks and brokerages actually offer these services. (WealthManagement.com, June 2014)
- HNWs spend 30.5 hours each week in some form of communication or dialogue. Of this total time, digital communication tools including email, web portals, social networking, or other channels, account for 19 hours, rising to 28 hours for the richest clients. (Scorpio Partnership, 2013)
Digital technologies are transforming how wealth managers do business
So what do these numbers really mean? Digital transformation is reinventing the way investors and wealth managers interact with one another. The “consumerization” of investor servicing is gradually becoming the standard in the wealth management industry. If firms resist the shift of becoming more transparent and more available through modern communication tools, they risk falling behind their competitors.
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