Last week we had the privilege of gathering with leaders from some of the industry’s largest wealth management firms for our web seminar, Modernizing Digital Wealth to Deliver Financial Wellness: SigFig’s Vision and Roadmap. In our time together, we not only had a chance to share SigFig’s unique view on modernizing digital wealth, but gained a collective view of the group’s priorities through a series of live polls conducted throughout the session.
Here are some highlights of what we shared about the migration towards a financial wellness model:
1. Increased consumer demand for financial wellness.
Wealth management is playing a more prominent role for a growing number of consumers. No longer just investment strategies for high net worth clients, the mass affluent are looking for a form of investment guidance that enables them to achieve financial wellness across their entire journey.
2.Financial wellness is a process, not an event.
Winning the emerging mass market will require a focus on goals, life events, getting to know consumers and what would make for good and well-timed financial advice. This may not be aligned with the more siloed product focus (i.e., banking, mortgage, insurance, etc) in many financial institutions.
3. Financial institutions are seeking new delivery models.
To compete for the growing demand for this new kind of financial advice, financial institutions—banks and credit unions, wealth management firms, and insurance companies—are looking for ways to modernize their approach. They are considering how they collaborate internally, to how and when they interact with customers – ultimately to reduce the friction for clients to take action.
4. Technology is accelerating model overhaul.
Technology is making it possible to move away from a rigid model of people pushing products in branches to a fluid model that identifies and responds to natural behavioral triggers. Putting information at the fingertips of customers and wealth managers enables personalized advice and experiences – when, where and how they want it – incorporating human interactions when it matters most.
5. A financial wellness model has 4 key pillars.
As companies look to modernize and migrate to more of a financial wellness model, they need to plan around four key pillars: integrated financial services with personalization, advice that drives outcomes, screen-based collaboration that leverages human relationships, and modernizing planning. These pillars working together make it possible to organically welcome new and a more diverse set of investors into your practice over time.
Not surprisingly, the polls throughout our session showed strong interest in headline grabbers, like AI.
But the session also confirmed our suspicion that basic “blocking and tackling” are still top of mind among executives as they pursue becoming the financial management partner of choice for an increasingly diverse population.
- Future roadmap planning showed a demanding “all of the above” strategy. 50% of participants said they were focused on all four strategic priorities listed – offering a goals-based planning experience for your customers, optimizing account opening, enabling advisors and clients to collaborate virtually, and serving the mass affluent investor efficiently. The remaining were singularly focused on goals-based planning (38%) and optimizing account opening (13%).
- Personalization and effective advice rise to the top. Of the 4 pillars of financial wellness discussed in the session, the two most important to participants were integrated financial services with personalization (40%) and advice that drives outcomes (30%), followed by screen-based collaboration leveraging human relationships (20%) and modernizing planning (10%).
Do you have wealth management priorities that didn’t not come out in these conversations? We welcome the opportunity to connect and hear your perspectives on the current and future wealthtech landscape.
