The WEALTHTECH Book

The Personalization Pillar

By John Wise

Co-Founder and CEO, InvestCloud LLC

Digitization is drastically changing wealth management. It is creating opportunities that were not possible just a few years ago. At the forefront of this is “hyper-personalization”.

Just as retail marketing has made leaps by leveraging advancements in digital content and data analysis techniques, hyper-personalization is the next value-add step in communication with wealth clients. Hyper-personalization promises to deliver higher client satisfaction at lower cost.

The State of the Industry

The threat to wealth managers who resist digital cannot be overstated, because clients increasingly expect more from their wealth managers, even while revenues evaporate. In addition, wealth management is in general behind the curve in digitizing. Wealth managers must evolve to survive.

High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are generally underwhelmed by their wealth managers’ digital offerings – including advisors’ ability to leverage their data to deliver better advice. Around two-thirds of clients would not recommend their current wealth manager and feel data is not being used to tailor advice.¹

HNWIs are digitally savvy. They already use digital financial service channels heavily – 69% use online and/or mobile banking and 40% use investment portfolio reviews. Some 47%, a surprisingly high proportion, would consider using a robo-advisor in future – although only 14% of HNWIs use robos today.² These trends are even ...