The coronavirus pandemic has transformed wealth management.

Wealth management and advisory has traditionally been an area of financial services that turned away from digital innovation and the use of advanced technology, with the understanding that complex financial decisions often require in-person conversations with experienced advisors who understand the ebb and flow of human life.

Coronavirus, social distancing measures and branch closures shattered that way of operating in March, and banks were left to scramble to modernize an outdated way of doing business.

“In so many ways, I think the global pandemic caused this revolution in how advisors and clients were communicating, and I think it’s going to permeate far beyond the pandemic itself,” said Joe Nadreau, Wells Fargo Advisors’ head of independent brokerage and platform services.

Strengthening self-service

Technologies like Zoom and video collaboration tools, which were starting to gain traction pre-pandemic, accelerated. “We had advisors — like a couple a week — that would ask for those technologies periodically. Once the pandemic hit, that became an expectation,” Nadreau said. Those few requests per week turned into hundreds, he said, and for Wells Fargo’s 13,000 advisors it became the new way to communicate.

As such, Wells Fargo Advisors, which has $1.5 trillion in assets under management, is accelerating development of capabilities that allow advisors and clients to work together in the digital space, Nadreau said. Currently, the San Francisco-based bank is prioritizing enhancing Envision, an interactive tool that allows the client and advisor to determine the client’s life goals and the probability of achieving those goals based on their financial situation.

The self-service tool can also deepen the relationship between advisor and client, when the client activity informs the advisor of the different plan variables the client explores, such as early retirement, or paying for a child’s college tuition, so the advisor can help guide the client through those changes.

Digging into the data

Meanwhile, Toronto-based RBC Wealth Management, which has more than $622 billion in assets under administration, accelerated its overhaul of advisor and client digital tools amid the pandemic, said Head of Technology Greg Beltzer.

“We know that both our advisors and clients want to be engaged, and have a relationship with us, through a digital channel more than we ever thought. So how do you facilitate that going forward with technology,” Beltzer said. “Data and AI are obviously the answer.”

RBC Wealth has been on a 20-month journey of digitally overhauling its offerings and systems, and next on the roadmap is combining client data and usage patterns with the use of artificial intelligence to help reveal them for clients in a move toward a self-service, 24/7 model. “Not to the point of replacing the advisor … but to be able to provide that service or that gap in times when the advisor isn’t available or there’s something more time sensitive that can be handled technology-wise. That’s what we’re really looking at accelerating,” Beltzer said.

In the recent lag of RBC Wealth’s digital transformation, the bank upgraded its advisor CRM to one powered by Salesforce that can integrate more easily with other platforms in its tech stack like MoneyGuidePro, Envestnet and Plaid, Beltzer said. The adoption rate of the CRM among advisors jumped to 93% of all advisors, compared with the 60% adoption rate of the previous one.

RBC Wealth Management also rolled out a new client portal in May and this summer launched additional functionalities, specifically cash-management tools and money movement between RBC accounts and with third parties.

Garnering digital engagement

TD Wealth, meanwhile, undertook an extensive research-and-development venture in late 2018 to better understand the client and advisor journey, said Ken Thompson, head of U.S. Wealth Shared Services. That project culminated in 900 hours of research into more than 150 processes and points of interaction to inform a new digital roadmap.

The pandemic reprioritized certain tasks outlined in the roadmap, driven by the need to ensure continuity of the things most critical to the client when 95% of TD Wealth US was working from home. For instance, TD accelerated the digitization of its more than 100 forms to offer e-signature capabilities and, in anticipation of tax season, ensured all forms and information could be easily downloaded. Self-service items like updating address changes and other account-specific information were also introduced during the pandemic.

TD Wealth US, which had $43.7 billion of assets under management at yearend 2019, also sped up the consolidation of 60 different platforms across wealth management for various different customer segments, which lightened the operational burden of having multiple custodians through which the bank holds client assets for multiple investment management platforms. “The client may not experience that directly, but they do by the fact that the advisor has to sort of ‘swivel chair’ between all these different applications,” Thompson said.

TD Wealth US is focused on boosting client engagement during video meetings, Thompson said, by testing self-service tools that keep the client interactively engaged with their financials, “because there is a connection that happens in human beings when they’re together that you can’t get from a video.” One such tool is a “planning playground” that the client can initiate themself without an advisor, allowing them to explore “if-thens,” he said, with immediate feedback to show how planning can change under those circumstances.

The coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly pushed wealth management to undergo a digital transformation that it perhaps was not ready to undertake, but the industry’s innovation leaders are looking forward, not back.

“We thought this [pandemic] was going to last two weeks … now we’re looking at not getting back into the office until next year. You can’t just keep going along thinking it’s going to go back to the way it was — it’s not, we’re not going to go back to that — so we need to be thinking holistically going forward, how can we serve these clients and provide value with technology,” Beltzer said.

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