How can technology be used to successfully bring in new clients? This article examines the digital onboarding experience.

How can wealth managers win in today’s increasingly digital world? Don Bergal, chief marketing officer at Avoka, a firm enabling customer acquisition and operating a number of platforms, considers the terrain. Avoka has offices in the US, Australia and UK. This publication is pleased to share these insights; the editors do not necessarily endorse the views of guest contributors and invite readers to respond. They can contact tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com

Traditional wealth managers are well behind the average financial services firm when it comes to digital readiness. Only 35 per cent of wealth management applications are made online, against 44 per cent across the financial services sector. This is a big worry as slick online robo services are shaking up the sector. 

The figures reflect that in reality it is difficult for wealth managers to digitise their core offering. Their clients - especially high net worth individuals - expect them to maintain a close relationship with lots of personal contact, and advice and services that are tailored to their often very particular needs.

This highly personalised service is a wealth manager's secret weapon, near impossible to replicate online. However, by automating simple processes such as onboarding, they can not only improve these processes but also free up time and resources to dedicate to providing that personal touch.

So do wealth managers combine a high value personal service with the convenience of digital where appropriate? 

Customers first
Merely having a digital or mobile onboarding process, while a step forward, is only the first step. Many wealth managers still run into "the abandonment problem” - customers who start the process of applying for a product or service but drop out before the end. Average abandonment rates across the financial services industry sit at around 85 per cent, a shockingly high number. This is because many financial institutions forget the most important consideration when developing a digital approach to sales - putting the client experience first. 

The quickest way to improve client experience is to make it simple. Cut out unnecessary hassle by capturing client data in as few fields as possible and autocompleting as many of those as you can. Every time a client is forced to fill in banal generic information, they edge ever closer to dropping out of the onboarding process. So make sure to minimise those moments. 

Next, allow people to save and return. There is nothing worse for a client than starting a digital onboarding process only to discover halfway through that it's much longer than they thought and they won't have time to complete it, while also realising that they're not able save their progress and quitting means starting all over again when they come back.

And remember the prevalence of mobile makes touchscreen technology a must. Touchscreen menus make it easier for people to complete a process on-the-go and, given the intuitive nature of their interfaces, most people prefer them to traditional point-and-click.

Mind games
Good digital onboarding processes are built with the user’s psychology in mind. Even little, seemingly innocuous details can be picked up by a user’s subconscious - affecting their thoughts and feelings about a process without them even realising and ultimately determining whether they stick with it to the end.

On one level this comes back to simplicity. People don't like poring over complex jargon. Use simple language to explain clearly what you need from a client and why. When asking somebody to “please input your personal information”, aren’t you really saying “tell us about yourself”? So say it.

And avoid the all-too-common mistake of overusing capital letters. You may think it gives a clear sense of urgency but it makes the user feel shouted at and harassed - something that won’t help keep them around for long.

Lastly, think about where you place items on the page. Eye-tracking studies give us clear data on how people look at websites, so design your onboarding process accordingly. This means making seemingly minor changes like placing labels above fields so they are easier to read. It might only save a split second but marginal gains soon add up into meaningful change.

Priorities
As in all aspects of life, it's important to get your priorities straight. By leading with the easiest fields for a client to fill in, you gradually increase their buy-in as the process progresses. It's much harder to drop out having filled in a lot of simple fields, with just a couple left to go than it is upon seeing that there are hundreds left and the first two were really hard. 

With this in mind, save document submission until the very end or you will put people off the process before it has truly begun. In fact, go one step further and group all documents together into one submission to further reduce abandonment rates.

Real-time strategy
Finally, make sure your digital onboarding process is able to adapt in real-time. In today’s fast-moving world you don’t need to wait until you have saved up stores of data to make major improvements to a process. Instead, you can make them incremental to each step in the user journey.

Analyse metadata to see where people abandon. Or to see where potential customers get stuck for too long and where they use autofills. Use this feedback loop to look for trends and see if you can work out what's happening and why. 

Once you have this intelligence, tweak the process and begin again - making constant marginal improvements to reduce abandonment across the whole onboarding process. Ambitious wealth managers can even seek to build processes that respond in real-time to individual customers - offering a personalised version of an automated service. 

And that’s the key. By combining high-value personal service with the convenience of digital processes, wealth managers can remain a force to be reckoned with.