In search of Utopia
The utopia of technology is an all singing, all dancing system from a single provider that does everything seamlessly and perfectly.
A combined front office, back office, CRM, cashflow, portfolio management, RegTech, accounting platform all rolled into a single technology available on every device together with access for your staff & clients to everything they need.
It should come complete with easy & secure WhatsApp style communications, video, document sharing, eSignatures and platform and provider aggregation. Not forgetting that it also needs to be an app on your smartphone and in your brand so your clients and staff can download it from the Appstore.
“Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.”
Alfred Stieglitz, (born January 1, 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.—died July 13, 1946, New York, New York), art dealer, publisher, advocate for the Modernist movement in the arts, and, arguably, the most important photographer of his time. Britannica.com
Waiting for your back-office system to offer easy, secure communications, that your clients can use from their tablets, smartphones and computers, together with integrated document sharing, eSignatures and pain-free provider and platform aggregation, downloadable as an app in your brand from the app stores, can’t be that far off, can it?
The Single Source of Truth
You may realise Utopia’s a long way off but some firms can’t move forward unless their client communications integrate two-way with their back office so that a record of all their communications are in the back-office and they can maintain a ‘single source of truth’ in one place.
But what if your back-office system can’t accommodate conversational communications and was built for older communication styles such as email and post. Do you keep relying on email and the post, or do you use your back-office’s inbuilt portal option that has no dedicated mobile experience and doesn’t get used by your clients or your advisers because it’s too clunky for them to use?
Ambitious wealth management firms that have looked past this and prioritised the client experience are surprised at just how efficient their operational processes such as onboarding, digital fact finding, client reviews, rebalancing become now they can rely on their clients being able to access their service whenever and wherever its convenient to them.
“When I first saw our app on my iPhone screen I was really excited and as we learned what the portal could do, our ambitions grew. We got the software for valuations but very quickly realised that it could help us with a lot of business processes and in particular secure communications.” Alan Flack, head of projects Town Close Financial Planning
If you want to keep your back-office audit trail, your client communications are still accessible and exportable when you need them in one place, although you may quickly realise that the true audit trail of client communications is the one that’s actually shared with your client. The one where you can both see what’s been said and access a history of all the reports that were viewed and signed by your clients.
An increasing number of back-office providers have or plan to extend their integrations to allow two-way integration with moneyinfo and pass back messages automatically to the back-office. They realise that Utopia is a long way off and their clients are unlikely to stick around for their back-office provider to deliver the all signing, all dancing front and back office system.
Isn’t it time to stop your legacy technology holding you back?“
We previously had a portal that was an add-on to the back-office, now we have a fully customised client portal and app that makes a massive difference to the whole client experience.” Derek Fish, managing director, Lomond Wealth Management
We’ll leave you with one last thought from Alfred:
“If you place the imperfect next to the perfect, people will see the difference between the one and the other. But if you offer the imperfect alone, people are only too apt to be satisfied by it.”
It’s like comparing a portal from moneyinfo with the one from your back office.
To learn how moneyinfo helps you achieve enhanced client loyalty, improved profitability, compliance confidence and is future ready with proven client adoption, book a demo here.
