OMNI-CHANNEL: HOW TO ADDRESS THE DIGITAL DISRUPTION IN INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

There’s a fundamental challenge for wealth, asset and investment management firms today; how do you effectively offer your customers a system with a seamless experience across all available channels — desktop, tablet and mobile device — therefore providing a modern ‘omni-channel’ world operating 24/7?

Recently a large number of investment managers, including Aegon, Aviva, Investec, Royal London and Standard Life, have announced plans to boost their Direct to Consumer (D2C) presence, having previously relied heavily on intermediated business.

It’s widely recognised that there’s a change in consumer behaviour with a significant group of retail investors preferring easy-to-use, non-intermediated options for investment they can carry out themselves, both online and via mobile devices, rather than pay for advice. As well as the shift in consumer behaviour, the intermediary landscape has fundamentally changed in the last few years (with unbundling of charges and pension freedoms) and this has made the cost of advice more transparent, in turn driving the need to adopt a digital presence.

DISRUPTIVE START-UPS

There is significant buzz around a number of innovation FinTech start-ups and their potential impact in disrupting the investment management industry that has operated largely via an established business model for hundreds of years. Companies such as Crowdcube, eToro, Wealthfront, Betterment and Nutmeg have all been highlighted in recent CB Insights reports.

Nutmeg, an investment service that puts together portfolios to match customers’ attitude to risk, was formed just three years ago and is now very much on the radar of the larger investment management firms. It also recently appointed a former Google executive to the role of Chief Product Officer.

With more investment management firms going digital by offering a mass-market online platform with simple to use, risk-profiled investment options, it’ll be interesting to see which are able to successfully differentiate their D2C platform. The best way to address digital disruption and the changes in consumer behaviour is to focus on the specific investment needs of your unique customers. Meanwhile, it’s crucial to recognise that the nature and demographic of investment is changing, with a shift away from the professional and towards the mass market investor.

CREATING A COMPELLING USER EXPERIENCE

Against this backdrop, it’s essential to build an omni-channel user experience and move away from considering each platform in isolation. After all, each platform has its own unique capabilities and features that should be exploited and combined.

Our whitepaper in this series, Making Technology Disappear: Building Omni-channel Systems for Financial Services, looks further into these issues to address the importance of user experience, rather than the device, when building an omni-channel system.

Contact us to find out more about how we can help you to create the perfect omni-channel solution for your business.

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This post was originally published on Scott Logic’s Insights blog at smarter.scottlogic.com/insights.