The wealth management sector is at a pivotal juncture, facing challenges from fluctuating interest rates, market volatility, and evolving geopolitical scenarios. Add to this the emergence of tech disruptors and new investment avenues, and the industry’s core is being redefined. Regulatory changes further complicate the landscape, demanding adept navigation.
The Imperative for Personalization
As the wealth management landscape undergoes a seismic shift, Traditional models – once considered infallible – are now being questioned. The clientele is diversifying, and a one-size-fits-all approach is rapidly becoming obsolete. Amidst these challenges, the concept of hyper-personalization emerges as a game-changer.
Hyper-personalization goes beyond mere customization. It’s about understanding individual client triggers, motivations, and expectations. It’s about resonating with their unique goals and aspirations. In a fiercely competitive market, this level of personalization is not just a luxury—it’s a necessity. However, there are considerable challenges in implementing personalization programs efficiently and effectively. The major challenge is the multitudes of permutations combinations for the “product-customer segment – persona – journey stage” that need to be considered for building up the personalization possibilities, thereby making it almost impossible to drive this at scale efficiently (optimal cost) and effectively (Maximal outcomes).
A Framework for the Future
To solve this very challenge, we are introducing a systematic framework built on four foundational pillars:
- Potential (ROI Quantification): It’s not just about identifying personalizations; it’s about quantifying their impact. This aspect of the framework ensures that tangible ROI metrics back every personalization initiative and thereby help justify the implementation budget and achieve cross-functional alignment.
- Persona Specificity: True personalization dives deep into individual client psychographics. By creating detailed personas, not just based on their segment and/or demographic attributes but rather on their behavioral attributes, the framework ensures that personalization strategies are laser-focused and relevant.
- Product/Client-Segment Context: Our framework also ensures that the personalizations are highly contextual to specific products and client segments, ensuring they resonate with the target audience.
- Prioritization: Our framework introduces a systematic approach to prioritize personas, stages, and personalizations, ensuring efficient implementation and maximum impact.
A Step-by-Step Approach
Our framework is not just a theoretical construct; it’s a practical guide designed to navigate the intricacies of personalization in the wealth management sector. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of its execution:
- Pre-work: Analyzing client data to understand investment behaviors, preferences, and the current journey.
- Persona Identification: Segmenting clients into distinct personas based on shared preferences, goals, and behaviors.
- Persona Prioritization: Applying the “Pointedness-Presence-Potential” fundamental principle to prioritize personas based on volume, identifiability, and financial impact.
- Current State Journey Mapping: Identifying client journey pain points and areas ripe for personalization enhancement.
- Stage Prioritization: Using the “Success-Emotion-Effort” fundamental principle to prioritize crucial stages in the client journey.
- Personalization Possibilities: Listing tailored interventions to enhance client experiences at specific touchpoints.
- Future State Journey Mapping: Envisioning an optimized client journey post-personalization interventions.
- ROI Quantification: Ensuring personalization strategies are both impactful and economically sound. Integration with AI: Leveraging our framework as focus priority input for real-time data analytics for efficient and effective hyper-personalization.
Illustrating Impact
In the whitepaper/report, where we have elaborated the framework at length, we have illustrated a case to show how a wealth management firm could achieve tangible quantified outcomes using our framework.
The case talks about a wealth management firm that observed a specific set of clients within their clientele, demonstrating a solid affinity for their digital asset product. Interestingly, those clients had yet to engage with any of the prior communications sent by their marketing team regarding that product. Upon further analysis, it was found that most clients fell under a standard persona – “Steady State Growth Seeking – Female.” The firm had 26,453 other clients mapped to the same persona within their clientele.
Given this context, the firm saw a critical need for a structured intervention to map and further personalize the journey of these clients. The goal was to improve open rates, click rates, and conversion rates, leading to a potential increase in Assets Under Management (AUM) from digital asset investments. Our framework led to the implementation of specific personalizations, resulting in a 1% point change in open rate, 0.4% point change in click rate, and a 1% point change in consultation/conversion ratio. This led to a 44.4% increase in the AUM ($1.13mn) within ten months of implementation.
This case illustration underscores the transformative potential of the personalization framework. The future of wealth management is undeniably intertwined with personalization. As firms navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving landscape, our framework offers a beacon of hope. By embracing hyper-personalization and leveraging systematic approaches, wealth management firms can redefine client experiences, setting themselves apart in a crowded market.
This article has been co-authored by Ashutosh Karandikar and P Venkatesh as part of Maveric’s thought leadership series – E.D.G.E (Experiences Delivered by Global Experts) – handpicks the game-changing technology ideas and pressing functional questions Banks and financial institutions must solve today.
These features – reports, whitepapers, podcasts, flyers, blogs, and infographics – are for Banking leaders and Technology evangelists to apply profound trends, the latest opinions, and transformational analyses to boost the performance of their organizations.
About the Author
Ashutosh Karandikar is a seasoned Customer Experience transformation leader and a Certified Customer Experience Consultant (CCXP) with 16+ years of global experience driving success across Customer Acquisition, Retention, Service, and advocacy. He is a passionate advocate of “Emotion” centric and “Techno-Creative Solutioning” approach to digital experience transformation.
As the Co-founder and whole-time Director at Maveric, P Venkatesh (PV) leads the global thought leadership function aimed at shaping and promoting Maveric’s perspectives as well as expertise in the banking technology space. By building relationships with industry influencers, partners and BankTech ecosystem leaders, PV drives creation of impactful frameworks, methodologies and landscape reports that provide informed perspectives on new age technologies that shape the BankTech space.
Originally published in Global Banking and Finance Review.
