The report’s recommendations are:
The most powerful way to convert digital sceptics is to demonstrate results. Identify small-scale ‘quick wins’.
These can be as simple as A/B testing different landing page treatments for content marketing activity, or ways to contact relationship managers. Any initiatives that help show marketing’s value in generating new leads can change perceptions and unlock investment.
Building a deeper understanding of clients starts with bringing together all the data the organisation holds about them.
We are increasingly asked to help AWM clients add online browsing behaviour to customer records, in order to help them understand and mitigate potential changes in fund strategies, or to find cross- and upsell investment opportunities – what we call predictive wholesaling.
Despite companies’ best efforts, pandemic-induced remote working has hampered the informal exchange of ideas between teams.
Businesses need to think about more systematic, process-based methods of dismantling silos.
Middle managers in AWM are often focused on the day job rather than transformation and the future. They don’t always have the budget or authority to carry change through and need permission, guidance and investment from the board in order to succeed.
Most start-ups use some variant of Agile Methodology to accelerate their response to customer needs and reduce time-to-value.
Interviewees for this report suggest focusing on the following characteristics:
Few of the report’s findings refer directly to technology, but digital maturity will be essential if businesses are to capitalise fully on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
AI is seen by many interviewees as the next big step in marketing automation. It enables what is known as ‘prescriptive marketing’; automatically selecting the best next communication to send a prospect to move them on to the next stage of their path to purchase.
The businesses that are quickest to realise this capability will open up a significant divide between themselves and their competition.
But in order for prescriptive marketing to work, organisations will need to have integrated both their customer data and their marketing systems across the entire customer journey. That might sound like a technology issue, but it’s actually just as much about culture. Teams and departments have to be happy to share their data to help the business hit its targets. They also need to understand how detrimental the ad hoc purchase of point solutions to their problems can be to the organisation’s overall performance.
Another interviewee, Sanchari Roy, marketing manager (VP) for Benelux & Nordics, Allianz Global Investors, summed up the situation:
“From an efficiency perspective, we can definitely use digital better,” she said. “It’s not only about what clients see; we could also use technology to make our internal processes cleaner and quicker, as long as employees are open to using new or different systems. This is often tricky as we all have our old ways of working and adapt to change in different ways.”
You can now access the full report – The world’s gone digital; why haven’’t you? Barriers to, and opportunities for, digital transformation in the asset and wealth management sector.
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