Wealth management firms, like many other financial services industry players, are under increased pressure to get ahead of the competition due to the increased availability of advanced analytics technology and regulatory pressure to effectively manage client portfolios.
Data is rapidly becoming every company’s most valuable asset, creating a tremendous opportunity for firms that translate it into meaningful insights. By the end of 2020, global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market is forecast to grow to $22.8 billion.
Despite billions spent on business intelligence each year across all industries, adoption by employees hovers at just 22 percent. As a result, millions of workers are left without access to the information they need to make smarter decisions. The primary reason for this is that legacy BI technology was not designed to handle the scale, speed, and complexity of today’s data landscape. Consequently, BI teams spend countless hours and costly resources simply to deliver one report or dashboard, while business users wait in frustration.
One of the main challenges in wealth management lies in integrating data from various trading, middle, and back-office systems. For example, most of the trades executed by wealth management firms must go through the bank’s trading systems or its parent company’s technology infrastructure. The constraint is that there is usually one for fixed-income, one for derivatives, one for forex, one for credit, and so on. The challenge from a wealth management perspective is to gather data from all the different systems to produce a consolidated view of the customer.
As seen in other financial services sectors, wealth management firms look to Big Data solutions to bring in and analyze customer data. These firms leverage analytics to help run their businesses efficiently, whether it’s for proposal generation, planning, portfolio construction, digital advice, investment analytics, rebalancing, client relations management, compliance, contact management, data analysis, mobile access, performance tracking, or reporting.
BI technologies enable organizations to analyze raw data, with the goal of improving decision making, enhancing client relationships, increasing operational efficiency, and adhering to legal and regulatory compliance mandates. Activities related to BI include data mining, analytical processing, querying, and reporting.
While wealth management firms typically lag behind other types of financial firms in their ability to develop timely, accurate metrics, a properly designed BI framework can provide wealth management firms with a rich, intuitive user interface that enables business users to run customized reports and even develop ad hoc interactive dashboards, all without the help of technical resources.
In our newest financial services guide, we discuss many aspects of BI, particularly in wealth management:
- Benefits of BI
- Challenges of BI user adoption
- Characteristics of an ideal BI candidate
- Getting started with BI
- Key considerations for the development and operation of a BI program
- Client success story
To download the guide, click here.
