Firms can help their wealth managers optimize performance, productivity, and client satisfaction ratings by improving their infrastructures, according to an SEI white paper.
As the financial industry faces changing consumer desires and expanding digital offerings, bank and trust wealth management firms are at a crossroads in how to best bring young wealth managers into the fold, while simultaneously ensuring they have the support needed to succeed with the new breed of investor.
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The paper, "Creating the Next Generation of Wealth Managers: The Financial Quarterback," explores what the wealth managers of the future will look like, and the role leadership plays in fostering employee and client growth.
"Through our research, we’ve discovered that wealth managers are most productive and add the most value to a firm when they’re working with clients to develop effective strategies to achieve life goals. With the abundance of digital strategies, pure investment and return advice is not enough — wealth managers must leverage the human factor to stand apart," said Al Chiaradonna, Senior Vice President, SEI Wealth Platform(SM), North America Private Banking.
"But, we’ve found that many firms are struggling to help wealth managers focus primarily on client-facing work because administrative and operational tasks get in the way. This points to a fundamental problem in an evolving industry like ours. If firms don’t analyze what makes a wealth manager productive, how can they expect higher productivity?"
The paper reveals that the next generation of successful wealth managers will be more like financial quarterbacks versus traditional wealth managers. No longer will they set long-term strategies and evaluate them quarterly or annually, they will evaluate situations in real-time and make changes where appropriate. Tools and on-demand data that help them better understand the entire client relationship, not simply transaction-based systems, are the keys to the future.
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By GlobalDataSimilarly, investors are changing as well, especially in the way they talk about their money. As such, goals-based investing has become an industry buzzword and a favored method to determine how to invest. That, in turn, alters the way wealth managers need to interact with their clients. The paper encourages senior management to help wealth managers cut down on non-client-facing activities in order to manage a more effective and comprehensive communication process.
To set wealth managers up for success, the industry should heed sports science, reveals the paper. Game film, data, good coaching, and a quality supporting cast all combine to put superior athletes in positions to win every day. This model translates well for wealth management firms. Firms looking to move from good to great need to better utilize the technology and information at their disposal to determine how the business model and company environment impacts wealth manager effectiveness. Only then can they work to correct any irregularities and improve performance.
"Just like a coach spends extra time molding a player, senior management needs to take the lead in turning wealth managers into the firm’s all-star financial quarterbacks," said Chiaradonna. "That takes more than just a pep talk here and there; it involves digging into the psyche of a wealth manager and creating best practices and strategies that help differentiate the firm from others."
The paper, published by SEI Executive Connections, is the fourth in a four-part series, titled "SEI Insights: The Future of Wealth Management," which explores four key areas outside of the financial industry that offer opportunities for transformation in the wealth management industry. The first three parts of the series examined the benefits of employing a unified platform to overcome legacy system issues, embracing business model reinvention to improve enterprise risk management, and challenging traditional thinking around asset-based segmentation. SEI Executive Connections is a community for bank executives and industry experts which provides business intelligence and opportunities to interact on banking topics and trends.
