New Trends in Wealth Management Promise to Help Financial Advisors Grow their Book of Business
Over the past year, Equifax met with nearly 20 leading financial institutions to better understand key challenges faced in Wealth Management. We heard consistent feedback when it comes to financial advisors:
- When an advisor meets a new prospect, they have no easy way to determine client potential. These advisors are frustrated with the current state of tools. They often log-in to many screens and websites to pull together data on their prospects and customers. They need help understanding who to pursue, based on client potential, as they often spend significant time and money on research and prospecting. To have an intelligent conversation with a client, advisors want to understand the financial capacity, investment tendency and lifestyle of their customers and prospects.
- When it comes to advisors, there is a war on talent. Banks and brokerage houses want to improve retention and development. Plus, the number two reason why advisors leave a bank is due to weak technology tools. Advisors want tools that allow them to be more productive.
- Many financial institutions have moved their CRM to Software-as-Service (SaaS) cloud platforms to manage their customer data. This is so they can see across their entire banking relationship: Commercial, Retail, and Investments. An advantage with cloud solutions is the ecosystem of tools they provide as add-on applications (“apps”) to further strengthen the stickiness of the CRM. From a support perspective, these Apps are very attractive to system administrators, as all of the effort to integrate to the CRM system has been worked out between the CRM company and the solutions provider of the App.
Wealth management executives now see a clear opportunity to leverage tools that empower advisors to gain more insight on prospects and customers in their book of business.
Management also benefits from tools that foster usage of the CRM, as they can then better gauge the share-of-wallet potential associated with new prospects and existing customers, as well as gain a market view of wallet-share.
Examples of household financial insights that Wealth executives want to provide to advisors include:
- Total assets and allocations, e.g., stock, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, and more
- Income from wages and investments
- Investment tendencies
- Demographic information on lifestyle and life stage
These measures help place prospects and customers into quadrants, so financial advisors can quickly identify who to Develop, Protect, Maintain, and Manage. Advisors can then focus more time to Develop clients with high potential, but currently have low assets under management.
Equifax worked with a large bank to quantify the amount of growth that could be attained by focusing more time on the Develop quadrant. The analysis showed that for the 378,000 households in the Develop segment, there was a Total Assets Opportunity Gap per Household of $113,000, which equated to a Total Opportunity of $43 billon (with a “b”). While it’s unlikely that the firm can capture 100% of that opportunity, closing 5% to 10% represents $2.1 to $4.2 billion of potential growth in assets under management. Results may vary based on your data and situation. Helping with the development of custom treatment plans for all clients in each quadrant is a benefit that these new Apps provide to financial advisors.
Equifax recently launched WealthGauge on the SalesForce.com platform to enable Financial Advisors to more efficiently identify high opportunity prospects and customers. WealthGauge is a Salesforce.com App available on their AppExchange as a managed package for IXI Network members. Financial Advisors can now more easily access reliable estimates of consumer income and assets, as well as investment tendencies such as likelihood for:
- self-directed versus managed account
- high risk asset holdings
- equity versus fixed income
- taxable versus retirement products
For more information on how Equifax can help your Wealth Management organization with market-leading apps, please visit the AppExchange on Salesforce.com here.