Advisor Productivity:
Advisors spend 28% of their day on administrative tasks¹ because they have to access 7+ applications on average. With SOA, they can access everything from a single desktop or portal. As a result, advisors stop being application integrators, and can focus on being holistic advisors and growing AUM.

Business Agility:
SOA modules can be implemented as needed on premise or on-demand. Plus, SOA modules are easier for IT to integrate & adapt over time.

Advisory Team Productivity:
Avoid redundant tasks and time allocated to new investor management activities such as investor profiling and proposal generation by up to 33%, with workflow and system integration.

Know Your Client (KYC):
Capture unique client needs and insights on each investor profile, and ensure portfolios and proposals match those requirements.

Firms with an open architecture are able to offer a variety of investment products (not firm, fund family or manager specific), to provide more investment options to their clients.

To cost-effectively support an open architecture strategy, firms will need to invest in a real-time, firm-wide product catalog in 2007. A product catalog is a centralized repository containing all investment products that the firm offers, recommends or endorses, with real time updates, and with access based on roles, entitlements and/or licenses.

Competition:
Investors are becoming increasingly savvy and they want access to the best product offerings in the industry not just the best offerings from a single firm.

Compliance:
Using a product catalog ensures advisors sell only products that they are licensed to sell and that are suitable for their clients.

Targeted Product Promotions:
Using product catalogs, firms can now officially endorse products they want to promote within classes.

Improved Client Service:
Provide meaningful and proactive alerts and reports to advisors, based on cash movement in client accounts, change in asset allocation relative to their IPS, and notification when the portfolios were last reviewed

Client Reviews:
Create professional, personalized client reviews faster and more efficiently.

The number of High Net Worth (HNW) individuals is increasing ever year. In 2007, if firms are not growing their client base and growing their percentage of share of wallet at the same level the market is growing, they could be losing market share.

Leading firms are automating and streamlining their client acquisition process using the latest front office tools. They are also integrating these tools with middle office CRM systems.

Close More Business:
By automating and streamlining the proposal process, firms can generate twice as many personalized and professional proposals.

Accuracy & Compliance:
Standardized templates, version control, and audit trails ensure accurate and compliant proposals.

As Baby Boomers retire, it is imperative that wealth managers be able to track client households, and have adequate planning tools and training to help their clients manage the wealth transfer process.

To facilitate inter-generational wealth management, firms need to use a client hierarchy or have a centralized repository that maps all the accounts, portfolios, and legal entities into a client household and third party relationship hierarchy.

Client Service :
Ensures advisors understand client households and can provide reports about the portfolios of their clients’ grandchildren.

Advisor Productivity:
A client hierarchy facilitates entitlement-driven reporting, as well as scoping of investment strategies and financial plans.

Given competitive dynamics, wealth management firms are beginning to look for ways to increase operational efficiencies in 2007.

To run their businesses more effectively, firms will need to invest in an integrated advisory desktop and tools to track and report on key metrics across advisors and locations.

In some cases, firms may even want to create standard operating procedures and verify that those procedures or guidelines have been followed. For instance, the firm may want to verify that all advisors have provided quarterly client reviews to all active clients.

Operational Efficiency:
Establish key metrics and ensure advisory teams and regions are meeting standard operating requirements.

In most countries, financial firms are facing a stricter regulatory environment.

By proactively complying with regulations, firms can gain a competitive advantage. For example, firms that comply with Reg 9 are often viewed by clients as being more secure for their investments.

To comply with Reg 9, firms should have a clear investment policy process and be able to validate that clients’ investment policies have been correctly implemented in their portfolios.

Reg 9 Compliance:
Pass the Reg 9 audit by demonstrating your firm has an IPS process and verifies that IPS has been followed.

Customer Satisfaction & Retention:
Ensure clients’ investment preferences are automatically incorporated into their portfolios and monitored over time.

Customer Satisfaction, Retention & Share of Wallet:
Be viewed as a partner and holistic advisor by understanding your clients’ life events such as retirement, new business, marriage, etc. and helping them plan for those events.

Products are becoming increasingly complex, especially for Asset Managers who need to distribute their products (or products of products) across multiple distribution channels.

Handle Product Complexity:
Promote product of products, and ensure consistent marketing messages on all products throughout the channel.

Proposal Personalization:
Capture client customizations electronically and rapidly create highly personalized proposals from standards-based templates.