Expert: Alessandro Tonchia Head of Strategy at InvestCloud Europe and Asia Facilitator: Brod Whiting, Director of JoyndUp
Overview:
This session discussed the importance of data quality and availability. Data quality and availability remain stubborn challenges, especially when consolidating clean data from disparate systems and sources. The reason is that getting data into a usable format and having resources to keep it updated and actionable requires significant investment in warehouses, governance, and dedicated teams. Although internal client data offers significant untapped potential for insights, resources are needed to analyse and harness it effectively. But, this high-quality data is foundational for everything firms want to do.
Discussion:
It was noted that there are challenges in getting advisers to input useful data into CRM systems. Systems often lack flexibility for tagging and segmentation, and a lot of data ends up in inefficient free-text fields.
However, doing so provides the ability to significantly improve the customer journey. It allows for personalisation based on high-quality, segmented data that feeds into adviser dashboards to provide insights and better tailor interactions. Participants noted that communication and the 'last mile' of personalisation are both critical. And it was thought that an approach based on simplicity, video, and meaningful two-way discussions could better serve clients with lower financial literacy.
The importance of ethics, privacy, relationship management, data segmentation, and nudging clients was also discussed. In particular, the acceptability of scraping client data from social media without consent and transparency was discussed.
It was also thought that AI has promise, not just in personalisation and insights, but also in compliance, client Q&A interactions, and recommendations - however, further development is needed and core systems and data pipelines need maturing first.
Key takeaways:
- There are key challenges and solutions around data quality and availability
- Systems often lack flexibility for tagging and segmentation
- Personalisation in customer journeys is seen as important but remains aspirational for many
- AI has promise, not just in personalisation and insights, but also in compliance, client Q&A interactions, and recommendations
