New Report: Mobile Apps for Financial Advisors Revolutionizing Client Interaction in Wealth Management

Zurich, Switzerland, March 18, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Mobile solutions for financial advisors to support client interaction and the advisory processes will become one of the most industry-disruptive, but potentially most rewarding developments in the wealth management sector. This is the main finding of the report “Mobile Apps for Financial Advisors and Wealth Managers” by Swiss research company MyPrivateBanking Research, which analyses the mobile solutions for wealth management and financial advisors offered by ten leading software vendors.

Overall, MyPrivateBanking Research was impressed by the depth of information and sheer numbers of features that vendors are providing in the first generation of advisor mobile solutions. “Existing mobile solutions for financial advisors show the potential for greatly improving the interaction between advisor and client by supplying real-time information, multi-media content and new ways of communication,” says Francis Groves, Senior Analyst of MyPrivateBanking. “This makes a real difference to client meetings and personal interaction between advisor and client that up until now has mainly been dominated by heaps of paper, often out-dated reports and portfolio data, with discussions of portfolios and performance where little scenario planning was possible.”

The report found that all of the advisor mobile solutions analysed demonstrated different aspects of good practice in solution design and four of the solutions were, in MyPrivateBanking’s view, not only well designed but had particular strengths in certain areas: the mobile solution offered by the vendor Appway for their outstanding support in winning new clients and complying with regulations across different jurisdictions; MicroStrategy’s mobile solutions are recommended for their highly customizable offerings with a comprehensive range of functions available; PolarisFT for incorporating excellent design features for financial planning and performance viewing; and SunGard for their focus on smaller wealth management businesses and very good use of mobile visualization tools.

MyPrivateBanking Research points out that all the analysed solutions have unique strengths and features but none have yet realized the full potential of mobile apps. For most mobile solutions, the vendors’ main wealth management platforms, which run on PCs and desktop computers, still tend to dominate their design. Their potential for revolutionizing advisor/client interactions can often be glimpsed but is not yet fully developed. The report sees the following major shortcomings in the current mobile solution offerings for financial advisors:

While these advisor solutions are generally rich in content and functionality, there is plenty of scope for developing their relevance to client meetings. For instance, six out of ten vendors provide a comprehensive and detailed portfolio management system and five had good performance reporting capabilities but only four allowed an advisor to produce ad hoc reports on the spur of the moment.

Existing solutions do an excellent job in helping advisors to carry lots of information into meetings but do less well when it comes to meeting dynamics. Just one of the solutions researched evidenced a well thought out meeting preparation component.

Report publishing and client contacting functions are unnecessarily limited. None of the solutions covered in the report provided the kind of full and flexible report publishing options, both for standard and ad hoc reports, that we would hope to see available to advisors in client meetings.

MyPrivateBanking stresses that advisor mobile solutions have to bridge the needs of two different categories of user, the advisor or other representative of the wealth management firm and their clients. Consequently they need to handle a level of complexity and a depth of information that is of a completely different order to that required of most consumer apps.

“Mobile solutions for financial advisors need to enable not just single interactions but to help to sustain relationships that can last for many years.” Is how Francis Groves summarizes the main challenges in developing the next generation of mobile apps for advisors. “They must normally be capable of a large number of different functions but they also have to perform in a way that doesn’t interfere with advisor being able to establish the all -important sense of connection with the client.”

MyPrivateBanking recommends banks and wealth managers integrate mobile apps solutions in their advisory process and client interaction as soon as possible. In the decision making on which mobile solution to choose they should pay particular attention to identifying the functions required as well as assessing the coverage of markets and operating systems by different vendors. Testing a mobile solution under real-life conditions to assess the benefits for advisors and clients is critically important, as is the need to have a clear grasp of the customizing capabilities of the solution.