360-degree views of the customer provide a comprehensive landscape of a client's financial situation and enable more personalized and effective advice. This holistic understanding helps build stronger relationships, enhances customer satisfaction, drives better financial outcomes for clients, and provides a competitive advantage for financial advisors.
Nevertheless, this goal is laden with challenges. Wealth management firms frequently struggle with the integration of diverse data sources and dismantling data silos to arrive at such a holistic view for customers. Even though modern customer relationship management systems offer mature capabilities for Customer 360, legacy technology stacks impede their rapid implementation.
Aggregating mass amounts of data is not enough—deriving timely and actionable insights can be challenging even with all the data in one place. Financial advisors spend a considerable amount of time analyzing client goals, their expressed preferences, current portfolio performance, new products that may be accretive to their goals, the client’s level of satisfaction as evidenced by past interactions, and other information prior to providing financial advice. This considerable effort detracts from their ability to focus on client engagement and service.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence offers a new avenue to solve these challenges, enabling financial advisors to spend less time grappling with systems and devoting more time to building and nurturing client relationships. In this article, we explore the common challenges around Customer 360 and how GenAI can effectively address them.
Challenge: Timely Insights
Timely insights can make all the difference in client servicing. Financial advisors require real-time analyses of customer needs and current situations to make informed decisions and respond swiftly to the changing landscape. However, real-time data processing and analysis can be challenging, especially with disparate data types and complex analytics requirements.
GenAI Solution: Automated Summarization & Insights
GenAI excels at summarizing large amounts of content and can, therefore, be utilized 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 prompts. This reduces the cognitive load on financial advisors and enables them to access up-to-date information promptly, facilitating timely and informed decision-making and allowing them to focus on client engagements.
Challenge: Context Switching Between Customers
Financial advisors often face challenges when shifting context between different clients due to unique financial circumstances, goals and risk tolerances. They must adapt their explanations and approaches based on varying levels of client financial knowledge and communication styles. Emotional and behavioral factors, as well as differing 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 impact their productivity, but also present the risk of unforced human errors while switching.
GenAI Solution: Virtual Assistants
GenAI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can enable financial advisors to query information across their client 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 in place, such AI assistants can also account for clients’ behavioral patterns and propose targeted scripts and conversation starters, appropriately incorporating the relevant data points.
Challenge: Diverse 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 like contracts and interaction notes, which can provide valuable insights. Each source has unique formats and structures, which can prove complicated for integration into a single system. The complexity of merging these disparate data sources into a unified view can lead to fragmented and incomplete customer profiles.
GenAI Solution: Intelligent Aggregation of Data
GenAI excels in processing and extracting relevant information from disparate structured and unstructured data sources. Leveraging commonly available foundation models, GenAI can parse large amounts of data and consolidate data points from various sources into a coherent profile. This results in a comprehensive and unified customer profile, providing wealth managers with a holistic view of their clients' financial situations and preferences.
Challenge: Data Silos
Different departments within a firm may have standards and ownership of the source data underlying different aspects of a customer profile. In the absence of a universal taxonomy for data elements, even after aggregating all the data sources, substantial manual effort may be required to map fields from the different silos to the target data model for a Customer 360 profile.
GenAI Solution: Intelligent Data Mapping
GenAI can be utilized to easily map data fields from source systems to a target schema for a comprehensive 360-degree customer view without the need for extensive individual mapping efforts. Consequently, manual labor is significantly reduced, enabling faster turnaround on data integration efforts required for producing 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 customer view morph into cumbersome, multi-year transformation efforts. The implementation of new out-of-the-box Customer 360 solutions becomes impractical as a result, significantly delaying the potential return on investment.
GenAI Solution: Flexible Integration
GenAI aids in extracting and transforming 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 retain existing systems while benefiting from modern integration capabilities, reducing the need for costly system overhauls and more swiftly realizing the desired Customer 360 vision.
Conclusion
Achieving a comprehensive Customer 360 view in wealth management is challenging— but it is achievable with the right tools. GenAI offers robust solutions to aggregate diverse data sources, dismantle data silos, integrate legacy systems, provide timely insights, and simplify data interpretation. By leveraging these GenAI-driven technologies, wealth management firms can enhance their customer understanding, streamline operations and deliver more personalized and effective services.
Ali Yasin is a Partner at Capco and co-leads the Data and Analytics and GenAI practices at the firm.
Chinmoy Bhatiya is an Executive Director at Capco and co-leads the New Realities division.
Habby Bauer is a Managing Principal at Capco and client and advisor experience lead with 25 years of experience in financial services.
