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.”

Today I’m boarding a plane heading to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.

It’s not my first time in the “City of Sin”, in fact I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been, but this trip is different. Tomorrow morning the Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit 2017 #GartnerAPPS begins. These shows are always incredibly insightful.

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.

This year, we were invited by Neo4j, one of our key development partners, to attend GraphConnect, their annual global gathering. This was the first year Neo4J held GraphConnect in New York, so NexJ was especially grateful to not only participate in this inaugural event, but to be one of the partner exhibitors as well. The gathering extended the reach of Neo4j, offering something for everyone, including developers, data scientists, big data architects, and business analysts looking to reveal new connections in their analysis.

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. 

PwC's 2017 Digital Banking Consumer Survey summary, "(Don't) take it to the bank: What customers want in the digital age," proposes a new segment of consumers they've called "omni-digital." They define omni-digital customers as those who "don't use physical channels like branches or call centers to interact with their financial institutions." 

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 today's financial services and insurance markets, you have access to massive amounts of information from multiple sources about your customers. The Internet of Things has led to an exponential increase in data types and sources, and assembling that information into usable insights can provide powerful knowledge about your potential or existing customers. 

This week, we had the privilege of hosting our Future of Wealth Management executive roundtable discussions here in Toronto, with a Canadian audience this time (see the insights from the one in NYC). It was a half-day event aimed at discussing the evolution of the advisor technology landscape, with a focus on customer engagement and relationship management.