For those in Wealth Management, what has emerged is the acknowledgment that customer engagement is more critical than ever before. 

Advisors who understand their clients better, and then use this understanding to meet specific needs more effectively, are going to emerge from this unprecedented crisis in better shape than the rest.

Innovation and a global approach

As the leader of a Customer Experience/Customer Success department, you get a lot of 'You're the guy who has to make sure that are customers happy’. While I like the idea of happy customers (Who doesn’t?), this is not how I would describe the

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed all kinds of industries and workplaces in a number of significant ways. Attitudes towards the use of AI have also shifted, along with the ways in which it has been approached. One of the biggest shifts has been the emphasis on top-down reasoning rather than bottom-up big data. 

This is more true for the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning than others, which is why our developers have put together a list of more commonly used terms to help you tell your Algorithms from your Active Learning, and Selection Bias from Sentiment Analysis.

Trying to tell corporate and investment bankers about the importance of understanding their customers is a lot like listing the benefits of butter to a pastry chef. They get it. They know it really, really well. And yet, considering we are in the business of Customer Relationship Management, I sometimes can't help but question what this means.

Wealth management is about trust. It is about giving an advisor control of your financial health and security and depending upon that advisor to make or recommend decisions that help you meet your financial goals. When we, as CRM vendors, focus on features that give our products an edge, we always focus on how specific features can help advisors build more trust. This is what makes relationship hierarchies so important.

 “VerticalCRM will be the preferred CRM Choice in the next three years”¹

Picture this: You, an advisor at a financial services firm, are interacting with customers. You have at your disposal an enormous amount of information related to their likes and dislikes, along with a comprehensive overview of their finances. 

I am often reminded of a specific parable whenever someone drops the words 'cloud', 'private cloud', 'hybrid cloud' or 'SaaS'. It's the one about the blind men and an elephant, who describe the animal based on which part of its anatomy they feel, then come to blows because they assume the others are being dishonest. 

A lot of people have the misconception that getting banks to change is like pulling teeth. It's a misplaced analogy, first because banks really are more open to embracing emerging technologies than most people think, and second because the last time pulling teeth was painful was probably around 1846, when the first successful surgical procedure was performed with anesthesia.

In my last blog [Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption, Part 2], I discussed NexJ's second set of three best practices for user adoption, and why planning, partnering, and encouraging leadership are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM.

In my last blog, I discussed NexJ's first three best practices of user adoption, and why developing, analyzing, and aligning are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM. Today, I'd like to discuss the next three of the 9 best practices for user adoption, which are planning, partnering, and encouraging.

In a previous blog, I discussed how to measure your user adoption rates, and the effectiveness of comparing quantitative and qualitative results. Because users can log into your CRM system, without actually using it, it's possible to have extremely high quantitative results without having high user adoption.

Some of you may be familiar with Next Best Action in the context of Sales & Marketing, where the consideration is which offer is most appropriate for which customer at a point in time. Extending Next Best Action to customer service seems a natural progression, considering the service representative is already engaged with the customer, and presuming the interaction went well, means extending the dialog with an appropriate offer. 

To deliver optimal value to our customers, NexJ leverages our vast experience in deploying our software at the most recognized financial services firms in the world, our strict focus on addressing the specific business needs of the sub-vertical markets within financial services and our fervent passion for innovation.

In "The Great Wealth Transfer is Coming, Putting Advisers at Risk," an article in Investment News, they pointed out that 66% of heirs fire their parents' financial adviser after they receive an inheritance. Marketing Wiz's "The State of Independent Financial Marketing" whitepaper discusses how every day, $2 billion in assets move from Baby Boomers to Generation X and Generation Y heirs. Combining these two statistics paints a concerning picture for financial advisors. How can Wealth Management firms address the needs of these inheriting children, to prevent losing 66% of their asset base?

The customer experience, now more than ever, is the bar we use to predict the health and growth potential of a business. Most major financial institutions are taking this to heart by adapting their services to deliver the “delightful” customer experience we’ve come to expect as consumers (think Amazon, Netflix, and Uber.) I was reminded of the sea change that is moving our industry towards intelligent customer management while at the Chief Data Analytics Officers (CDAO) event in Boston last month. I contributed to a panel discussion about the emergence of machine learning in financial services, where I was joined by industry peers with first-hand experience transforming their business with data-driven insights. The efforts of fellow panelists and thought leaders, like José Murillo of Banorte, were on full display. Our lively exchange made clear that the disruptive forces of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are here to stay.

Our hard work continues to get noticed as Nucleus Research, a global research and advisory firm, has once again recognized us as an Expert in their most recent CRM Value Matrix.

It’s interesting that artificial intelligence is such a hot topic these days because AI itself is not new. The concept of an ‘artificial brain’ was discussed by scientists in the 1930s. In 1950, Alan Turing created the Turing Test to distinguish machines from ‘thinking’ machines.

It’s been astonishing to see the amount of media attention around Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent months. From the dystopia of HBO’s Westworld to the hype of Salesforce's Einstein, we’ve been inundated with larger than life claims about AI and its abilities. 

Clients choose NexJ because they are looking for a highly integrated solution as a strategic investment in their business. Their primary goals typically include improving the customer experience and driving cross-sell and upsell. To accomplish these goals, commercial and corporate banks are looking for an integrated banker experience that uses an enterprise view of the customer to drive cross-system workflows and enable bankers to collaborate across channels, regions, and lines of business. 

Many organizations established, or are presently establishing data lakes as a cost effective means of provisioning operational intelligence query and analytics capabilities directly to the field personnel who need them the most, understand the data the best, and are the most capable of actioning insights gleaned.  Sounds like an ideal arrangement.  

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many front-office system upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity improvements. So how do you sort out the empty promises from the legitimate? 

Back for it’s 2^nd year, the Digital Integration in Wealth Management conference took place last week in London, UK at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel. The two-day event, put on by the folks at Arena Financial, brought together industry thought leaders in Wealth Management.

Interested in AI, Intelligent Customer Management, or Chatbots, but having a hard time unpacking what they all mean? Adam Edmonds, VP of Products at NexJ Systems, explains everything you need to know in this series of short videos.
 

High user adoption rates reflect that your company's software investments are being appropriately leveraged, and ideally show that users are engaging with the system. To determine the effectiveness of the software at your company, you need to know your user adoption rates.

Vendors have a similar language when it comes to describing the benefits of their solutions but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the same results with every solution. Whether you’re looking for CRM, customer engagement, business process management, or a customer insights platform, it’s worth your while to ask each vendor how their solutions deliver on their promises.

The power of AI at scale

In my previous blog, I introduced the concept of Intelligent Customer Management that we discussed at NexJ Client Day. Many of our Wealth Management and Private Banking customers were eager to discuss how it could explicitly apply to them. 

Whether you’re shopping for customer relationship management, customer engagement, business process management, or a customer insights platform, you’re bound to come across similar vendor promises. “We’ll help you better understand customers. Improve the customer experience. Increase productivity.”

It was a pleasure to attend the inaugural Wealth 2.0 conference in Canary Wharf, London, UK last week. The two-day event brought together industry leaders from some of the top wealth management firms including Barclays, BNP Paribas, Schroeders, Northern Trust, Rabobank and many more as well as robos like Wealthsimple, Nutmeg and PensionBee. Of course, innovators like NexJ such as SwissQuant and Addativ were there too.

In early November, we welcomed our clients to Toronto for NexJ Client Day. Clients got together to share ideas and discuss the future of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) within financial services. The theme of the day was Intelligent Customer Management.

I know, I know… I’m always talking about how it’s the age of the customer and how everything revolves around the customer. Guess what? I don’t just talk about it, I live by it too. Last week, it was my privilege to host our 2017 Client Day here in Toronto. We were joined by senior business and IT leaders from many of our customers from across the globe, across the country, and down the street. 

I’ve spoken in the past about integrated desktops and the value they bring to advisors and the firm. In essence, the integrated desktop brings together all the information and applications an advisor uses into a single workspace.

I’m a consistent conference goer. I go to learn about and discuss all things wealthTech, and every year we see the bandwagon steer towards the same trends. This year especially – though certainly true of the last few years – we seem to have latched on to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). I see demos of some really cool technology. 

In our last post, we looked at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms that banks are using to drive their digital initiatives. Now, we come to the central question that banks are faced with: “We have a great brand. How do we grow revenue? And can we increase customer loyalty while doing it?”. 

This is the third and final post in my series on Digital Content. In the first post, we discussed how your advisors can build a personalized professional brand using NexJ Digital Engagement and Artificial Intelligence. In the second post, we discussed using the same AI tools to deliver personalized touches to your existing clients.

Today’s leading businesses have embraced technology to innovate and find an edge in our connected marketplace. It’s the Age of the Customer, and your customers have more options than ever before to access the financial services they need. 

In my previous blog, I discussed the importance of using content to create a personal brand on social media. To recap, NexJ Digital Engagement uses Artificial Intelligence to match articles from public news and internal sources to a profile that is unique to each financial advisor or banker. 

This year’s conference was jam-packed full of content. Billed as the event for following innovation in wealth management, this year’s incarnation did not fail to deliver on that. NexJ was among twenty 8-minute “Disrupt Demos” presented this year. It was a great way to get a lightning tour of the industry’s latest and greatest.

Digital brands are important. In the digital age, customers do research on their financial decisions before they even contact the bank. They Google, talk to friends and colleagues on social networks, and look at the websites for both the institutions and the advisors themselves. When it comes to financial decisions, they are looking for someone they can trust and who will be a partner, not just a vendor. Your institution and your bankers themselves must communicate a unique perspective that makes them stand out from the crowd before the client reaches out directly.

This year, CGI’s conference was in beautiful Naples, Florida. The conference, focused on CGI’s North American Wealth Management and Global Banking solutions, brings together analysts, thought leaders, and also all of CGI’s wealth and banking customers.

It’s still a little hard to get used to. For a number of years this would be the week I would make my way to the Big Apple, the financial services mecca of North America, to attend #CRMEvolution. The event used to take place in a hotel right in Times Square. There was always a flurry of activity all around.

It’s 3:45 a.m. and my alarm is screaming at me to wake up. I reach for my phone to stop the blasphemous racket. By instinct, I manage to shut it off but the noise keeps blaring. I realize that I had set the alarm on my tablet as well. Good thing too, because that's the alarm that brought me to my senses. As someone predisposed to staying up late rather than waking early, the hour is more familiar for being the end of a day than the start of one.

In my recent blog, Customer-Centric Digital Transformation, I discussed the strategy for ensuring the customer is at the center of digital transformation. Today, I’d like to discuss one particular channel, the Contact Center. 

In any industry, like financial services, that relies on maintaining deep relationships with their clients, it’s critical to understand and service the client across their entire journey. Successful client experience solutions focus on features across what we call the “The Customer Lifecycle.” 

For me, wealth management is more than just a target vertical that we serve at NexJ. It’s also my personal area of interest– not just from a fintech perspective, but also from a business and industry perspective. As part of that interest, I keep my own wealth advice training up-to-date with the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI). 

For some, it’s about reducing costs by modernizing the back office.  For others, it’s about leveraging disruptors within their enterprise.  For NexJ, it’s all about the customer.In the age of the customer, the customer is in control of their journey.  They dictate how and when they will interact with the firm.  

On October 10, 2014 at NexJ’s client day, Julie Ask (@JulieAsk), Forrester Research analyst and co-author of The Mobile Mind Shift, spoke to our customers about the behavior changes occurring as a result of the adoption of smartphones and apps. 

Next week, I'll be flying to London, England, for the Customer Experience Exchange for Financial Services. The Exchange is a meeting of senior executives responsible for the design, development, and delivery of customer service strategies and solutions. Bringing together a range of exclusive experts from the Financial Services industry, this conference provides valuable information on current and future trends in customer experience.

Even today, a key attraction for talented advisors (and more importantly their books of business) is offering a fully Integrated Advisor Desktop (IAD) platform. The big warehouses and the successful Investment Banking Divisions (IBD) know that integrating custodians/account management, portfolio management, order entry and management, financial planning, research, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are table-stakes these days.