Intellect Design Arena Extols the Virtues of its ‘2020 Advantage’ Digital Solutions Suite
Nagaraj Prasadh of Intellect Design Arena
Nov 28, 2019
Nagaraj Prasadh, Country Head for Thailand at Intellect Design Arena, addressed the audience at the Hubbis Indonesia Wealth Management Forum to highlight how the firm’s WealthQube gives the 2020 Advantage, describing how the digital product enhances the performance of relationship managers in the wealth management industry. He said it is possible to increase RM productivity by 20% and increase revenue by 20% at the same time, while managing the stringent regulatory requirements. All this is achieved through leveraging digitally enhanced outreach and contextualised experience, which results in actionable insights to direct the destiny of the business.
Intellect Design Arena Limited is a global leader in Financial Technology for Banking, Insurance and other Financial Services. With a rich suite of products across the organisation, Intellect Design Arena creates financial technologies that help banks lead businesses on the path to growth and success.
Intellect Design presents itself as an authority on vertical and integrated products that enable institutions to meet their ambition to be the principal service provider to their customers. The firm prides itself on its deep involvement in the wealth management segment. “Our key focus in that domain is on enhancing the skills and success of the relationships managers, who drive revenues,” he reported.
Prasadh explained that his presentation was to address the very basic question as to what makes an RM great and how - right technology/platform can help them achieve that. He explained that RMs need the right intent, the right content and the right decision-making skills to engage with the customer in an effective way.
Touching the life of a customer and making a positive impact is what Prasadh believes technology can achieve.
“Digital will help in the transition from a relationship manager or financial adviser into a trusted adviser by enhancing productivity,” he reported. “To do this you need a digital toolkit, which will help the customer plan financial goals effectively, set goals for themselves and see as to where they are vis-à-vis their priorities and targets. We can help them set goals for investments, retirement, critical illness, education for children, vacation - any of those areas that could impact the way that they earn and spend money. We can implement these with our technology.”
Prasadh also explained how his firm can provide digital solutions to help clients choose and build portfolios by over 40 asset classes - equity, fixed income, mutual funds etc. - indeed by any form of investment. “The customer can choose what he is investing in and you will have the digitised view of it all. The RM can then jointly work with the customer and analyse the portfolio because the view the RM has is the same as view the customer has, so there is no confusion on what is your screen versus what is on his screen.”
He then explored the business goals of the RM, the most important of which is to generate new business. To do this, he explained, the RMs need to identify and pursue cross-sell and up-sell business opportunities with new customers (New to Business) and existing customers (New to Offering).
“Just as it is important for the organisation to manage the existing book of customers,” he elucidated, “it is also important to create new streams of revenue either by obtaining new customers or cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers.”
The wealth management industry therefore needs to understand the needs and provide holistic advice, whatever it is, specialist solutions, for example, ESG or social impact-based investing. “We need to hear the voices of the customers,” he said. “We need to fulfil their needs for a trusted adviser. We need to hear when they say that they need the right service and people to make investing easier, and thereby making their lives better.”
The second goal is effective customer engagement and the objective is to provide RMs with a platform for something more meaningful beyond a sales pitch - a personalised end-to-end customer experience with great content, interactive, and real-time customer support is what it takes to gain customer’s trust.
He highlighted how the third goal is planning and advisory, remarking that the goal is to be a trusted adviser. He explained that the WealthQube platform should not only help RMs with the current asset allocation, but also help align it to the model portfolio and see where it diverges, recommending buys/sells to rebalance.
“That helps the RM become more of a trusted adviser,” he explained, “and as it also allows the RMs to simulate a portfolio of each customer and see how the portfolio would perform, it again boosts the RM proposition to the benefit of the client.”
He reported that to ensure that is possible, the right set of information and analytical tools are required to help the client to make informed decisions. He noted that leveraging the information from the various disparate systems the wealth management client firm can then use it effectively with Intellect Design’s strong analytics helping RMs to enhance decision making capability.
With that, he delved into more detail on how analytics will help. Supported by some detailed and insightful slides from his presentation, he demonstrated how the RM can leverage the analytics to add new products and solutions the client needs and to enhance his or her up-sell or cross-sell efficiency. It is all about identifying the right product for the right customer and right customer for the right product, he reported.
To help engage the client, there is information within the system that provides a reason to meet the customer. This could be as simple as product maturity alert, for which WealthQube gives the RM an alert notification, and that is a reason to call the HNWI client, thereby helping drive more meaningful and productive conversations.
He also covered the system’s monitoring performance. The system should help RMs to monitor their client portfolio and should also help to see how RMs to monitor their own performance against their peers, and at the same time enable supervisors to take corrective measures, such as coaching and mentoring, thereby helping RMs to meet their goals.
Prasadh explained that Intellect Design Arena’s solutions are agnostic and therefore apply to any device, whether PC, iPad or mobile. The RM can actually be providing clear advice to improve the portfolio and make the holdings more effective, he remarked.
He also touched on compliance, which of course is an ever more vital element of the wealth management business. “What if we could help with the documentation?” he pondered. “What if you could do secure video-based onboarding or advising? Onboarding and frictionless KYC and all the documentation related to that can be enabled with our solutions. In essence, you can have all the elements of CRM seamlessly integrated in a single system that allows you in the wealth advisory industry to help protect the firm and the investor against regulatory discrepancies, allowing the customer the information and views to make their own decisions, that help with creation of what-if scenarios for their investments.”
He concluded by remarking that in these ways the RM becomes the trusted advisor providing solutions, enabling decision making and participation and road-testing investment scenarios to help hone the portfolios.
“Do you as an RM know the customer well?” he asked. “Is your knowledge about that segment correct? Is your engagement with them effective enough? And are you making decisions accurately based on customer insights? You will be able to track, self-assessment and learning, resulting in happy customers and a higher wallet share. And in this line of business, customer stickiness is what is highly effective and certainly necessary. So, you as RMs will be able to monitor how you are performing and then select the course and correction that is required.”
He closed by explaining that the 2020 Advantage can significantly increase the RM’s productivity, by as much as 20% and increase revenue by 20% as well. “Embrace the future,” he said on closing, “and you can be leaders.”
Director & Country Head at Intellect Design Arena
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