The year is 2022. Billionaires are messing about in space and we’re one giant leap closer to getting humans on Mars (just me, or does that bother anyone else?). Driverless cars might not be moving fast (yet) but technology sure is, and so are your clients’ expectations.
Yes, having been thrust into the future (some more willingly than others) by a pandemic, clients will now be expecting their financial advisers to double down on their burgeoning digital capabilities by building a successful, sustainable digital customer experience.
They don’t want much, do they?
Like Musk, Bezos and Branson in the billionaire space race, you might be feeling the pressure to up your game and make bigger strides forward. If so, I’ve got some refreshingly down-to-earth tips to help you scale up your digital strategy and accelerate into a new frontier.
Prepare for take-off
You’ve made some first steps to a digital way of working, what next? While every financial advice business is different, it starts in the same place with the same question - ‘Where do you want to go?’
To set a roadmap for the future, you’ve got to be clear about what you want to achieve. So start by identifying what you ultimately want from your digital strategy.
To give you an idea, these are some of the most common reasons financial advice businesses like yours embark on a digital strategy:
- To deliver a better client experience
- To stop wasting time on slow, manual processes
- To save money
- To serve new or different client segments
- To achieve better compliance and security
- To be more sustainable and environmentally-friendly (a big one for 2022 - read our separate article on it).
You might want to achieve more than one of those - go for it! Once you know where you’re headed, it’s much easier to create a plan to make it happen.
Three rules for digital success
A useful mantra for any successful digital strategy is to ‘think big, start small and scale fast’. This will help you focus on the right things and make progress faster. I’m pretty sure this is what Elon Musk does to get his out-of-this-world projects off the ground.
1. Think big
- Have a strategic vision about where you’re trying to get to (if you don’t have this, go back to the start).
- Undertake a health check to establish the strengths and weaknesses of your digital capability (your Iress account manager is the perfect person to ask if you need a second opinion).
- Identify the degree of agility in your business. Can your technology stand up to strategies developing and moving forward?
- Pick the top three journeys that cause you the most pain or those where you see the most gains.
2. Start small
- Take the time to understand your clients’ needs and their personas, so you know what problems you’re trying to solve.
- Identify some first steps that you need to do before moving on to the projects - this could be cleansing your client data so it’s compliant and manageable, or identifying team members to act as champions for what you’re doing.
- Get into the discipline of moving things forward quickly.
3. Scale fast
- Create a timeline of projects or SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) objectives to stay on track. Focus on iterative development so that you can keep your initiatives moving forward.
- Few businesses have the time or capability they need in-house, so think about getting in touch with your Iress account manager to see how Iress can support you.
- Learn and evolve your roadmap to ensure you are meeting the needs of your clients and stakeholders.
Don’t stop there
When it comes to digital strategy, there is no finishing line. Just as space exploration will go further, client needs and expectations will continue to evolve. Aim to implement a culture of continuous evolvement. That’s the digital utopia.
