Be ready to handle more customers with increased profitability
In wealth management, regulations and the need for control have tightened. Unfortunately, wealth management is an industry filled with shadow IT. The set-up typically consists of several different systems such as trading systems, systems for risk, accounting, CRM, portfolio management and client reporting, together with an awful lot of tinkering in Excel and VBA. That is, a lot of systems that were not originally designed to communicate in a reliable and secure way.
This type of set-up is a problem – and the challenges increase exponentially with the expansion of customers. The more customers you have, the harder it is to manage data, to ensure the quality of that data is good enough, and for you to have a clear picture of everything from investment strategy to exposure and risk.
At the same time, Private Banking advisors face growing challenges in data management and reporting, as both investors and regulators have become significantly more demanding in terms of both the amount and quality of the information to be reported.
A Private Banking advisor can easily work with up to 200 customers – and when advising a large and diverse group of investors, the overview can quickly slide without a proper set-up to manage a high volume of customer portfolios. You need a solution that can be scaled without using too much time. A solution where most time-consuming tasks are automated.
Read more to find out the benefits of a flexible and efficient investment management solution such as Vitec Aloc’s PORTMAN and how to utilise it for business benefits.
#1 Achieve easier scalability and reporting
As a Private Banking advisor, it is important to maintain an overview of your customer portfolio, but the challenges of managing the various tasks arising from this have never been greater.
Administrative and compliance tasks can be particularly draining, taking precious resources away from tasks concentrating on business development. For example, fee calculations and reporting can take an inconvenient amount of time without a proper set-up. It is not unusual for the process of generating monthly or quarterly customer reports, including the calculation and verification of fees, to take several weeks, especially if you’re working with shadow IT or other non-integrated stand-alone systems, or where data is not updated automatically.
The challenges exponentially increase as the customer files increase, and ongoing customer reporting can add up to a massive number of employee hours a year. Over 50 employee workdays can often be saved annually on customer reporting alone.
Fortunately, scalability is much easier with an efficient investment management solution such as PORTMAN. Reporting can often be reduced to 1-2 days per distribution. This means that you can take on more customers without having to find extra time – so that money can be used for customer engagement, holistic advice and business development rather than performing the unnecessarily heavy reporting and administrative tasks.
#2 Free up resources for activities that create extra value
A flexible investment management solution also means that you can free up resources as many processes will now be automated. This gives you more time for core tasks, reduces administrative costs and minimises resources associated with heavy systems or manual processes.
Inefficient processes and workflows mean that more customers require more hands. And these aren’t cheap to employ. Salaries are high in our industry.
In other words, they must be pretty valuable customers if you are able to pay the extra salary that comes with scaling up your customer base while using inefficient workflows and outdated IT solutions. Not to mention the overhead of reassigning tasks when employees are on holiday, are sick or change jobs or positions.
Freeing up time also means that you can create extra value for your customers, as it is now possible to focus on customer facing activities instead of administrative tasks.
#3 Achieve operational execution security
Misreporting is every Private Banking advisor’s nightmare.
Because if there’s one thing a customer remembers, it’s inaccurate reports. And if you work with some form or another of shadow IT, the risk of that happening is significantly increased.
An important step in trying to eliminate misreporting is ensuring data quality. You can, fortunately, do this with an effective investment management solution. With the right portfolio management solution, you ensure that you’re sending the correct numbers to the customer.
And this creates credibility with your customer, so they can trust that their Private Banking advisor has a firm hold of their investments. But it also creates an efficient organisation, as the data comes in quickly and correctly, is calculated for risk and returns, and can create a solid foundation for ESG, tax, etc., and ensures that the system security and data validation are working.
In other words, you’ll get greater operational execution security, because you have a system that automatically validates data for you.
#4 Become less dependent by becoming more robust
High data quality requirements, accessibility of data and real-time overview of exposures, risks and yields places high demands on the technological infrastructure of the company.
With an efficient and scalable platform, you can future-proof your set-up so that you can meet current high demands, while also being better prepared for future regulations or alternative investment opportunities.
When manual processes are automated, time is freed up for analysis, insight and process optimisation, and at the same time, the company becomes less dependent on people, because accurate data is automatically sent to the relevant departments.
#5 Better sustainability and alternative investments
Sustainable investments (ESG) are an increasing demand among investors. This applies not least to Private Banking customers, who are also increasingly interested in alternative investments and in the hunt for stable returns at a time where the yield on stocks and bonds is relatively small and/or very volatile.
And future requirements to be able to invest sustainably and in alternative investments will demand that you have the right foundations to be able to manage and support these investments.
The challenge, however, is that many don’t have the necessary infrastructure or the correct procedures to handle these types of investments in an efficient way – meaning that the value of the investment cannot be calculated easily and quickly.
With an investment management solution such as PORTMAN you can much better support alternative investments, as you get the technological infrastructure necessary to master the increasing complexity of investment opportunities. A choice that many others have made in recent years.
And this allows you to meet customers’ demands for sustainable and alternative investments – whether you have 50, 500 or 50,000 customers.
PORTMAN – your solution to customer reporting and performance measurement
Is scaling knocking on your door?
Our PORTMAN solution is a complete solution for professional and efficient management of Private Banking and is used by several significant players in the Nordic region.
PORTMAN consists of modules, which means that the platform is protected against future requirements that arise as the business grows. You simply subscribe to the modules that meet the new need.
Our Private Banking solution is an integrated solution that covers front-to-back management through:
a flexible and scalable solution for servicing high net worth individuals, as well as more traditional wealthy customers in the mass – affluent segments.
online dashboards and tailored reports that can be customised to fit your corporate identity and marketing.
efficient system support for other critical business processes and help in becoming MiFIR-compliant.
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Mikkel Severin Lyngbye
- Chief Sales Officer, Vitec Aloc
- Tel.: +45 2999 7141
- Email: mikkel.lyngbye@vitecsoftware.com