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Preparing for a digital future

ARTICLE BY

  • Kobus Wentzel
  • Head of Distribution
  • 1Life

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Today’s financial adviser wants tools and insights to offer hyper-personalisation, get a holistic view of clients and efficiently service clients at scale. This is according to Incedo, who recently hosted leaders from a cross-section of the wealth management industry to obtain grass-roots insights. It’s not hard to see why these requirements are important for servicing the client. 

Strengthening relationships

When considering digitally enabling your practice, choose technologies and partners that will have a positive impact on practice growth and on your client’s experience. Currently, the focus in the industry is on pivoting from transaction-led models to relationship-based ones and, with the pandemic still fresh in our minds, interpersonal relationships have become extremely important. This pushes the financial adviser front and centre, as the human connection between the client and their finances. It prioritises the importance of the advice process. 

But, in order to create enough time to truly engage with clients and focus on the advice process, the modern-day financial advice practice needs to consider digitalising time-consuming and error-prone tasks. This makes it necessary to adopt a digitalisation tool that enables straight-through processing, real-time underwriting, remote acceptance and, from a wealth product perspective, incorporates a LISP – freeing up time for the financial adviser to spend on business planning and the advice process instead of on everyday administrative duties.

A recent Broadridge survey of financial advisers found that financial service firms that were digitally ready had 14% higher sales growth versus firms that were considered digital laggards.   At 1Life we saw a similar trend where some of our partners grew their practices 200%, simply because they were digitally ready when the pandemic hit.

Best of both

Most clients today are digitally savvy individuals who want a seamless delivery of services through the channels they prefer. This points to the implementation of a hybrid model within your financial advisory business or a hybrid between the traditional and the digital. A hybrid model is a mix of face-to-face client-adviser interaction and digital enablement. It requires a deep understanding of each individual client by the financial adviser and the ability to deliver the services they need, digitally. The benefits include:

  • The ability to offer a broader spectrum of offerings
  • Flexibility to choose face-to-face or online advice
  • A greater focus on the client’s financial well-being and building of generational wealth
  • Stronger interpersonal relationships
  • Seamless client servicing that is faster, easier and simpler
  • Cost-saving for the advice practice

In 2020, Swiss Re predicted that the insurance industry – and distribution, especially – would have to transform digitally if it was going to succeed in a digital age. Just two years later, the time for that transformation has arrived. Client preference for digital channels and pressure to grow revenue mean you have to rethink strategies, operations and technologies in order to be future-ready.

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