Customer Experience: the next differentiator in Wealth Management

WELREX Founder & CEO Yevgeni Agerd reflects on last month’s Finovate Europe 2024 event in London, at which he and Chief Digital Officer Lorenzo Caffarri demonstrated the WELREX platform. Additionally, Yevgeni articulates the next challenge that Wealth Management faces.

The full video of the 7-minute demo can be viewed on our YouTube page.

It was a pleasure and honour to present on the main stage at Finovate Europe with my colleague Lorenzo. We were one of 28 start-ups who each had a strict 7 minutes in which to “pitch” our solutions – no slides, no pre-recorded video, just a live demo. It was an enjoyable process and I felt that all aspects of the organisation and logistics by Finovate were top-class. 

Whilst relatively few of the companies presenting demos at the event operate in Wealth Management, nonetheless I took away a strong theme of consistency in the fundamental challenge that everyone was seeking to address: namely, the compelling need to improve the customer experience we all offer, whatever our sector and whatever our role in the customer journey.  

Why do I say this? Because it feels that, despite best efforts and a lot of talk, time, and investment, Wealth Management still has a long way to go to ensure the customer experience we all offer is fully aligned with and truly meets our customers’ real needs. As the founder of a digitally native business, I recognise we are well positioned to deliver an ultimate customer experience. Of course, it will have to evolve and reflect the evolving environment around us.   

Many incumbent firms have invested significant amounts of time, effort and resources in large-scale technology and IT projects which are designed to dramatically improve how their relationship managers engage with their clients, and the quality of service they deliver. Only to find that those desired improvements in customer experience remain elusive in reality – customer engagement remaining low, or the digital journey simply not resonating with their clients.  

There can be several reasons why this happens – misunderstanding of customer needs; change of strategic focus due to external events; conflicting organisational and functional priorities – all of which lead to a dilution of focus on the original intention and only achieve incremental improvements in client experience delivery. Firms need to see beyond – and work through – such obstacles if they really want to create client-centric, compliant, and cutting-edge digitally assisted solutions. 

At WELREX we ground our customer experience approach in the following important principles: 

– The priorities of the client must always be at the heart of everything we do: be it the need for a choice of solution providers, to quickly make sense of excessive information on fees, or to enhance investment performance with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.  

– Technology is only good when it delivers: using the latest and hottest technology for the latest and hottest technology’s sake is not the approach we pursue. Deploying technologies that deliver what our clients need the most, in a way that our clients prefer, is our driving force. 

– Vision in delivering customer experience is sometimes more important than surveys and focus groups. Without wanting to sound arrogant, industry professionals, thanks to interactions with a variety of clients from a variety of walks of life, sometimes know better than customers what steps in the client journey can be transformed or removed altogether. As long as our ‘why’ is aligned with clients, the ‘how’ will fall into place. 

– Agility is key: having the right business processes and routines hard-wired in your development processes so that you can always stay agile and ensure you’re delivering what your clients genuinely want – and can course-correct swiftly to stay aligned.