Wealth management is about building a strong and sustainable trust relationship with your Client.
This relationship is the fruit of knowing and understanding your client – anticipating his needs and providing him with personalized products and services that allow him to consolidate his financial prosperity.
Digitalisation in this context has always felt a bit awkward – whereas in other areas of banking going digital has been an inevitable development, in wealth management digital tools have often been considered as a barrier, not enhancing but rather hindering a personal contact with the client.
And yes, digital tools can be poorly designed, with cumbersome menus and counter-intuitive navigation, topped-off with a tedious client enrollment and login. Common inquiries like knowing the balance of a portfolio or recurring transactions like payment or even trading stock trading might be possible, but often detrimental to the smooth relationship with the client.
You were probably right to be hesitant and not the first mover for this generation of tools.
In a crisis like COVID19 where personal interaction is nearly impossible, phone calls difficult to record, but your client claiming an even closer interaction with you, you would need a way to communicate swiftly, efficiently, and most of all in a secure and user friendly way with your client.
Digitalization is now a means of communication rather than just automatization – and this is true for all generations alike. Both young and old read e-Books, stream Netflix and use the family chat in Whatsapp to stay in touch with the loved ones.
So the time is ripe for Conversational Banking:
Forget menus, submenus, buttons – use what you always use when you communicate: language. Be it written or spoken: the client now uses your secure instant messenger that he previously downloaded from the app store. He authenticates with his fingerprint and starts writing to you right away or leaves you a voice message. This works both sides: should you need a confirmation from your client, just write to him – a client relationship has never been easier.
Conversational Banking specifically allows for semi-automated use cases : they are initiated by script or a bot at bank side and can then be followed up by a human if the client engages in the conversation. Examples are pushing the state of portfolios to the client, asking for confirmation for a portfolio rebalancing in order to fit the Client’s risk appetite, MiFID alerts, corporate actions or just pushing a prospectus of a new product to a well targeted group of clients.
The integration of the qualified Electronic Signature in Conversational Banking is a must: you want the user interaction to be seamless and avoid discontinuities by asking the client to print a document, sign it on paper and send it back.
So if you feel that you missed out on digitalization or that you are lagging behind, you actually are not: you were just waiting for the right tools to build and develop the long lasting trust relationships with your client. So leapfrog Internet Banking and Mobile Banking and focus on the right channel: Conversational Banking.
