Digital Wealth Management Tools and Transformation

In a highly connected world, clients want faster and more convenient offerings and a cutting-edge digital experience. Similarly, to grow their book of business and assets under management, advisors need the ability to strategize, execute and maintain financial plans by utilizing efficient and reliable tools. This paper will highlight key considerations for firms when designing their digital capabilities on both the front-end and back-end experiences. 

Wealth management firms must continuously innovate, transform, and adapt their suite of advisor and client-facing tools to remain competitive and retain top advisor talent. Front-end development should enable advisors and clients to interact and engage with software in an easy-to-use, intuitive, and seamless environment. While back-end development should reduce data latencies, increase user efficiencies, and improve the overall user experience.

Goals-Based / Financial Planning Systems - What actions are expected to be taken from these systems?

As the scope of financial advice has shifted not only from investment recommendations but also to a holistic wealth management approach, strong collaboration between advisors and their clients is critical. Advisors need the ability to capture all aspects of a client’s financial life (assets, income, desired spending, financial goals, etc.) and generate efficient analyses and scenarios to best achieve the financial goals of clients. Wealth Management firms should consider the following features/ functionality to support advisor financial planning platforms: 

• What-if scenarios/portfolio stress testing 
• Annuity Modeling 
• Withdrawal/ Tax Strategies 
• Cash flow analysis
• Self-Service tools - dashboards, notification - reduces the need for front-office support from operations (e.g., advisors requesting updates on the status of an account transfer)

Client Portal 

Clients are becoming more engaged and committed to participating in the investment process. Wealth management firms must invest in client-facing platforms to increase transparency in financial strategies and customer engagement. Portals are not only a place for clients to view their financial goals and savings plans, but should also be a tool that enables clients to contact their advisor(s), connect with support/investment product specialists, and adjust planning scenarios such as retirement age, income levels, spending habits, and significant expenses.  The continued development of these systems creates an interactive and collaborative experience for clients’ financial wellness. Wealth Management firms should consider the following features/ functionality to support client-facing platforms:  

• Chatbots (e.g., send questions directly to their advisor or interact with AI bot for common inquiries)
• Ability to add/remove planning partners (e.g, spouse account / co-planner for holistic household financial picture)
• Ability to add external accounts (e.g., see all accounts and take action all in one place)
• Ability to add financial goals – retirement planning, funding a 529 account, purchasing a home, etc.
• All of these functionalities should be intuitive for self-service, reducing call/email inquiry volume in service centers. 

Back-End Systems 

As the financial advisor workflow becomes increasingly digitized and automatized, wealth management tools need to support the execution and fulfillment of advisor strategies. Enhancing back-end processes will not only lead to benefits across the firm’s front and back-office but to its clients as well. Ultimately, a seamless and reliable end-to-end workflow will retain advisor talent, attract prospective hires, and enhance the firm’s competitive advantage.  Wealth Management firms should consider the following features/ functionality to support back-end processing:

• Straight Through Processing (STP): The elimination of manual processes through automation has been an undertaking of many firms across various industries, most notably in Banking & Financial Services. By enabling STP, Wealth Management departments and firms are able to reduce, minimize, or eliminate their dependence on manual intervention; through the replacement of back-end manual account transfer processes with automation, firms are able to decrease transfer processing times, mitigate/avoid all risks associated with manual processing (including human error), and reduce operating costs.
  • Benefits
    • Reduces the need for operations teams to manually re-key data into backend systems
    • Eliminates the need for operations teams to review, validate, and/or cross-reference data in different systems
    • Eliminates the processing of physical forms where possible (the faxing, scanning, and emailing of physical transfer requests by operations)
    • Decreases transfer reject rates for firms and their clients through the provision of systematic validation (replacing “manual” validation)
    • Eliminates the need for manual routing of transfers by enabling for streamlined routing to the appropriate operations teams

• Replacement of on-premise Order Management Systems (OMS) with cloud-based platforms: For wealth management firms, cloud-based platforms can facilitate a much greater degree of scalability and flexibility for data processing rather than on-premise hosting, which traditionally has a longer lead time.
  • Benefits
    • Enhances both trading capabilities and support of sophisticated order types and products (i.e. complex options, real-time allocations)
    • Improves regulatory controls, mitigates errors and losses, and improves ease of compliance with new regulations
    • Allows for future scalability and increased security/system resilience

Sia Partners has extensive experience in the wealth management field, having consultants deployed on some of the industry's most prominent digitization, transformation, and integration initiatives. 

Digital / Modern Wealth Management

Expertise in the development and implementation of Digital Transformation, incorporating data science and machine learning to support goals-based investing, Digitally Enabled Distribution, and more: Self- Directed Trading, Robo-Advising, Predictive Analytics, E-signature, and E-delivery, Digital-Enabled Distribution, Single-Point-of-Entry Platforms (mobile & desktop), Personalized Comprehensive Reporting Dashboards, Omni-Channel Client Engagement Solutions.

Product / Domain Expertise:

Extensive experience maximizing data efficiencies and front-to-back harmonization with a broad range of Investment products and solutions including Mutual Funds, Money Market Funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Retirements, 529s, Equities / Options, Syndicates, Insurance, Annuities, Alternative Investments, Crypto, Advisory / Fee-Based Products, across Business Units, Operations, Technology, Legal, Risk, Finance, and Compliance.

Technology & Platform

Specialization in technology and platform Integration within the Advisory and Managed Solutions space, including Platform Consolidation, Technology Modernization, System Integration & Extensibility, Firm-Wide Standardization, Waterfall & Agile Software Development Life Cycle, and Cybersecurity.