Blog

Key Wealth Management Trends for 2020

Today, longer life expectancy is driving wealth managers to expand their offerings beyond strictly investment advice to include multi-generational financial planning. For this reason, asset managers must engage their clients in new ways to collaborate around both their financial goals and the fiscal well-being of their dependents.

Fortunately, the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) platform offers a rich set of tools to help wealth managers stay ahead of the curve. At Dreamforce 2019, industry thought leaders examined some of the trends that are shaping the wealth management industry, and how Salesforce is helping its customers address them.

Investment advice: no longer the final frontier

Until recently, most clients have expected their wealth managers to focus primarily on investment performance. But according to Andy Wang, Global Head of Wealth and Asset Management at Salesforce, this is no longer the case. In his Dreamforce session, he noted that the role of an investment advisor has evolved from solely delivering investment advice to offering more comprehensive financial guidance. Wang commented, “In a typical sixty-minute meeting, asset managers are only spending ten minutes talking about portfolio performance.”

This change requires that wealth managers spend more time coaching their clients on a broader spectrum of financial considerations. Salesforce Financial Goals can help wealth managers track a client’s progress toward major purchases, retirement savings or other life goals. Setting such targets ensures that customers can plan for significant life events and prioritize how they allocate their assets—all with the aid of a trusted asset manager.

Planting the seeds of the family tree

As life expectancy increase, parents and guardians are facing decisions about how to support and assist their dependents—without putting themselves at financial risk later in life. This trend has caused a shift towards more household-centric financial planning and requires that wealth managers take into account stakeholders that may not have factored as prominently in the past. According to Wang, “As life expectancy goes up, you typically have adult children that need to be informed.”

The Salesforce Household data model allows wealth managers to map out the relationships between a customer, their dependents, and other parties such as brokers, realtors, attorneys and more. In this way, the tool can help wealth managers and their clients take into account all related parties when making important financial decisions.

AI-powered business insights = smarter wealth management

As wealth managers collect increasing amounts of data around client and household financial goals and relationships, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will play a key role in converting that information into actionable business insights.

In their Harvard Business Review article What Machine Learning Will Mean for Asset Managers, Pozen and Ruane state that, “A form of artificial intelligence, machine learning enables powerful algorithms to analyze large data sets in order to make predictions against defined goals.”

Salesforce Einstein Analytics for Financial Services helps wealth managers do precisely that. “Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery,” Einstein equips wealth managers to identify patterns and understand which channel to use when engaging with each client. Also, it arms them with valuable insights as they interact with different records in Salesforce—insights they can use to make better investment decisions, communicate with clients more effectively, and target leads and opportunities more efficiently.

Unlocking a wealth of opportunity

To remain competitive and adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of today’s wealth management industry, asset managers must be agile and alert. And while the changes may present challenges, they also offer an abundance of opportunity—both for wealth managers and their clients. In fact, Iwan Schafthuizen, Managing Director of Business Development at Ortec Finance, noted in his Dreamforce session that goal-based financial planning leads to a 15 percent increase in wealth for consumers.

Leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform, wealth managers can tap into a larger pool of assets, deepen client relationships and ultimately, drive value and growth for both their customers—and their books of business.

For more information on FSC for Wealth Management, click here or contact Zennify today.

Written By:

Share this article