In our increasingly digital world, one industry where traditional players have particularly struggled to keep pace with evolving customer demands is financial services and, specifically, Wealth Management. With new fintech or Digital Financial Services (DFS) players seemingly popping up every week (see article), traditional wealth management firms have more competition than ever, which forces them to undergo a digital transformation as well. Relying on data for decision-making has also been on a sharp rise, and advisors can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of data and information they now have at their fingertips. They can experience a type of paralysis where they do not know where to begin on best utilizing the data, often reverting to old outreach habits. Finally, leading wealth management firms use their CRM to track not only empirical data such as financial performance, but also personal interests, hobbies, and relationships to drive qualitative measurements of high-value client households.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) empowers wealth firms with the tools they need to compete in this crowded marketplace. We’ll walk through the three main challenges we hear our Registered Investment Advisors (RIA) customers currently face and how Salesforce FSC enables wealth advisors to overcome these obstacles, improve their client relationships, and ultimately increase their bottom line.
Core Challenge #1: Limited Digital Offering
As end-users in today’s world, we’ve been spoiled with fast on-demand services, and now expect instantaneous and seamless self-service from all of our other service providers. This expectation is part of the “connected” world, as it’s been coined.
With the pandemic, digital engagement preferences have only accelerated and now is the norm for many formerly in-person activities. According to a Salesforce Research study completed in October 2020, 68% of customers say “COVID-19 has elevated their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.” Another study done by JD Power noted that 41% of banking customers are now digital-only.
With these high expectations of digital offerings, how can wealth advisors possibly meet or even exceed their clients’ demands?
With Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC), you can build a self-service client portal directly in Salesforce that allows your clients to:
Complete onboarding tasks through guided prompts
Submit Know-Your-Customer (KYC) documentation
Securely access investment accounts and performance dashboards
Self-Schedule appointments with the appropriate resources
Engage with trusted resources (tip of the day, weekly newsletter, blog posts, etc.)
Submit referrals
Submit cases
Engage with a chatbot for frequently asked questions
Imagine that after a new client signs the agreement, they receive an email to confirm registration to the client portal. After choosing a username and setting a password, the client can log in and see a welcome message as well as their onboarding status and action items, such as filling out beneficiary information. After funds have successfully transferred, the client can view account balances and portfolio performance updated daily in a dashboard view.
Example of a branded client portal:
