360-degree customer views provide a comprehensive view of the customer's financial situation and enable more personalized and effective advice. This comprehensive understanding helps build stronger relationships, increases client satisfaction, drives better financial outcomes for clients and provides a competitive advantage for financial advisors.
However, this goal is fraught with challenges. Wealth management firms often struggle with integrating disparate data sources and dismantling data silos to arrive at such a holistic view for clients. Although modern customer relationship management systems offer mature Customer 360 capabilities, legacy technology stacks hinder their rapid implementation.
It's not enough to collect massive amounts of data – deriving timely and actionable insights can be challenging even with all the data in one place. Financial advisors spend a significant amount of time analyzing clients' goals, their expressed preferences, current portfolio performance, new products that may be accretive to their goals, the level of client satisfaction as evidenced by past interactions, and information others before giving financial advice. This significant effort reduces their ability to focus on customer engagement and service.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence offers a new way to solve these challenges, enabling financial advisors to spend less time dealing with systems and more time building and nurturing client relationships. In this article, we explore common challenges around Customer 360 and how GenAI can address them effectively.
Challenge: Time Insights
Timely insights can make all the difference in customer service. Financial advisors require real-time analysis of client needs and current situations to make informed decisions and respond rapidly to the changing landscape. However, real-time data processing and analysis can be challenging, especially with diverse data types and complex analytical requirements.
The GenAI Solution: Overview and Automated Insights
GenAI excels at summarizing large amounts of content and can therefore be used to summarize customer interactions and data, providing insights without manual effort. The speed of GenAI models makes it possible to reanalyze data in real time, providing continuous actionable insights based on pre-engineered requirements. This reduces the cognitive load of financial advisors and enables them to access up-to-date information immediately, facilitating timely and informed decision-making and allowing them to focus on client engagements.
Challenge: Context switching between clients
Financial advisors often face challenges when changing the context between different clients due to their unique financial circumstances, goals and risk tolerances. They must tailor their explanations and approaches based on clients' different levels of financial knowledge and communication styles. Emotional and behavioral factors, as well as different life stages and priorities, require tailored emotional support and guidance. Additionally, advisors must maintain strict confidentiality and adjust strategies based on individual client portfolios and market conditions. Such context switches can not only affect their productivity, but also present the risk of unforced human error during switching.
The GenAI Solution: Virtual Assistants
GenAI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can enable financial advisors to search for information in their clients' portfolios using natural language. These tools can answer questions and provide insights in an easy-to-understand format, enabling financial advisors to focus on client engagement and satisfaction. With the right prompting, such AI assistants can also calculate customer behavior patterns and propose targeted scripts and conversation starters, appropriately incorporating relevant data points.
Challenge: Different data sources
Wealth management firms typically handle data from a variety of sources, including CRM systems, financial systems, goal tracking systems, and third-party financial data providers. They also have a wealth of data in unstructured sources such as contracts and interaction notes, which can provide valuable insights. Each source has unique formats and structures, which can prove complicated to integrate into a single system. The complexity of bringing these disparate data sources together into a unified view can lead to fragmented and incomplete customer profiles.
The GenAI Solution: Intelligent Data Collection
GenAI excels at processing and extracting relevant information from various structured and unstructured data sources. Using commonly available foundation models, GenAI can analyze large amounts of data and consolidate data points from different sources into a coherent profile. This results in a comprehensive and unified client profile, providing wealth managers with a holistic view of their clients' financial situations and preferences.
The Challenge: Data Silos
Different departments within a firm may have standards and ownership of source data based on different aspects of a customer profile. In the absence of a universal taxonomy for data elements, even after aggregating all data sources, considerable manual effort may be required to map fields from different silos to the target data model for a Customer Profile 360.
The GenAI Solution: Intelligent Data Mapping
GenAI can be used to easily map data fields from source systems to a target schema for a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer without the need for extensive individual mapping efforts. Consequently, manual work is significantly reduced, enabling a faster turnaround on the data integration efforts required to produce a Customer 360 profile.
Challenge: Legacy Systems
Many firms are burdened by technology debt and an environment of legacy systems that are not flexible enough to integrate with modern data platforms and off-the-shelf customer management systems. Upgrading or replacing these systems can be resource intensive and disruptive to operations. Consequently, traditional approaches to achieving a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer turn into heavy multi-year transformational efforts. Implementing newly available Customer 360 solutions becomes impractical as a result, significantly delaying the potential return on investment.
GenAI Solution: Flexible Integration
GenAI helps extract and transform data from legacy systems by interpreting and reformatting textual information. GenAI-powered tools can consume data from legacy systems, convert it into compatible formats, and integrate it with modern platforms. This approach allows organizations to preserve existing systems while taking advantage of modern integration capabilities, reducing the need for costly system overhauls, and realizing the desired Customer 360 vision faster.
CONCLUSION
Achieving a comprehensive 360 customer view in wealth management is challenging – but achievable with the right tools. GenAI provides powerful solutions to aggregate disparate data sources, dismantle data silos, integrate legacy systems, deliver timely insights, and simplify data interpretation. By leveraging these GenAI-driven technologies, wealth management firms can improve understanding of their clients, streamline operations, and provide more personalized and effective services.
Ali Yasin is a partner at Capco and co-leads the firm's Data & Analytics and GenAI practices.
Chinmoy Bhatiya is an Executive Director at Capco and co-heads the New Reality division.
Habby Bauer is a Managing Director at Capco and leads the client and advisor experience with 25 years of experience in financial services.