Insights

Digital Services in Asset Management: The Missing Link

Asset managers that delight customers will thrive. A recent example is Macquarie Asset Management’s launch of The Sharpe Advisor, a tool designed to help financial advisers master alternative investment education through a variety of media including video, webinars and written thought leadership. Specialized digital resources such as these arm advisers to better serve their clients.

The key to customer orientation for asset managers is to examine the outcomes for the customer versus the product performance. Asset managers typically don’t have a direct relationship with retail investors. Advisers have the direct relationship with investors and exert a much greater influence on investors’ cash flows and allocations into specific investments, which significantly impact investor returns. Advisers, here, are the driving force. The need to nurture the relationships with advisers is further informed by a recent survey by Broadridge indicating that advisers expect more help from asset managers – through engagement, education and enablement.

A value-oriented approach involves identifying white space where traditional ways of supporting advisers have significant gaps. This is where digital services and experiences can shine the brightest.

Here are a few aspects to consider:

When Publicis Sapient partnered with the distribution arm of a large global asset manager, they were ready to embrace a distribution-led transformation via the SPEED capabilities. One of the initiatives started with the hypothesis that wholesalers can remotely support an important set of advisers in conjunction with self-serve capabilities on the web and mobile app. Strategy capability is geared to identify white spaces to play. This is based on an outside-in and inside-out analysis of the customers, the business and the capabilities.

Experiments were conducted with a handful of wholesalers and a pilot was launched to reimagine an interactive version of a small body of highly used static content and build that out. Designing a simple and intuitive experience with frequent input and validation from the control group played a big role. The emphasis was to focus on helping the user realize value rather than creating something shiny that lacks substance.

Making the pilot available in the field for the control group and gathering basic analytics on the usage of interactive content provided substantiation of the potential. Even with limited training and no top-down mandate, the shift from using a bunch of different pieces of static content to immersive, interactive content was very quick. Product capability helps manage the priorities of different stakeholders and set up the execution of the digital service buildout and evolution for success.

Engineering teams operate in close collaboration with experience and product teams to bring the digital service to life. Portability and maintainability of the front- end code is often an important consideration. The team made implementation choices keeping these considerations in mind. Since a lot of the interactions are based on investment data, the team is streamlining the process of periodic data updates so that the interactive content has a much longer shelf life as compared to its static cousins.

‘Dataful’ digital experiences generate meaningful data and improve themselves based on data and analytics. The success of this service is obvious from the analytics on the use of interactive content which now makes up much of the most commonly used content by sales teams.

This service contributed to ensuring strong sales performance even in the most challenging of times during the pandemic. Looking ahead, there’s a lot more potential to be realized by integrating it with other capabilities that support virtual engagement and bringing interactive content into the mainstream self-serve web experiences.