Real Integrations - Real Digital Moats
With a nearly two-decade technology advantage, compounding every year with new capital investments, independent RIAs and smaller wealth management firms focus for 2022 should be to formulate and establish their digital moats.
But how?
With great plans comes great questions, so here’s three considerations for building up the digital moat through integrations:
Which system and data points were used to “win” the relationship? How is your firm utilizing households, beneficiary, and investment holding data to service relationships throughout the year? What is the data needed to support these critical front office operations [e.g., proposal generation tools] and middle office operations [e.g., compliance administration]?Crafting the digital moat game plan using integrations can enable immediate differentiating capabilities:
Identify the proposal generation process and the data to support the client from proposal generation through the First 90 Days with the firm Identify the investment data, historical holdings data, and historical beneficiaries’ data necessary to support retirement KPIs and Identify the data from vendors [e.g., Zephyr, MoneyGuide Pro] that is material to winning the relationship, maintaining the relationship, and growing the relationship
Establishing these three key data elements creates the list of “integrated data” requests from existing vendors that the firm will need to begin creating digital moats. Obtaining the digital moat requirements is crucial to the subsequent step of crafting the “how to win” tasks and play into operational workflows where a digital moat will begin building a “perpetual relationship profile” for the firm, helping any wealth management firm compete, on par, with larger would-be competitors.