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Fahad Modak shares an article that explains how to improve client experiences in the asset and wealth management industry.

The asset and wealth management industry continues to experience a lot of consolidation with deals such as Morgan Stanley/E*Trade/Eaton Vance, Schwab/TD Ameritrade, and Franklin Templeton/Legg Mason. Scale is becoming an important competitive advantage in this winner-takes-all environment.

Leaders in sales and marketing at these firms are pressured from all sides to be more relevant and valuable to their clients. Not only are they competing with other firms for market share and encountering more price pressure, but their clients have higher expectations of them as well.

Both institutional and individual investors want personalized insights that will help inform their decisions for maximum growth of their portfolio performance or financial goals. Clients are increasingly more sophisticated, and as demographics shift, Millennials and Gen Zs are looking for more convenience, more channels for access, and more customized service given the rise of technology-enabled disruptors in the marketplace.

All this pressure understandably creates some anxiety. We would like to shift this anxiety to opportunity as we lay out how digital transformation can revitalize your client relationships.

Creating a 720-degree view of the client

Sales has primarily been a relationship-driven business. Increasingly these days, sales must be a data-driven business to maintain an edge with your clients. You need to know who you’re serving if you want to serve them better. But many sales and marketing teams experience data as a tax rather than a benefit. They feed all of their activities and client information into a customer relationship management (CRM) system, but the data just moves up the ladder in the form of reporting to senior management. It doesn’t return to the seller to enrich and enhance sales and marketing efforts.

So, the first opportunity toward delivering differentiated client experiences is to create a unified view of the client based on data that you collect from direct interactions. In the past, you had to access several disparate systems to obtain information about the client such as the performance of the investments they had with the firm, the overall assets under management (AUM), or the name of their investment consultant. A unified 360-degree view of the client is already an improvement over those fragmented and incomplete profiles.

An even more exciting opportunity is to expand beyond the firm to gather external data that the client is creating out in the world through their own engagements. This data can be sourced from social media, citations in articles, and speaking engagements—anything available in the public record. This 720-degree view may sound like hyperbole, but by leveraging technology, it is achievable.

Key points include:

• Intelligent prospecting
• Tailoring content
• The client onboarding and services process

Read the full article, Delivering differentiated client experiences in asset and wealth management, on Microsoft.com.