Meeting client expectations with technology

Caroline Deutsch: Hi, Ed. SEI is very much focused on the future of wealth and designing solutions and services that power that future. What's your view on the future of wealth?

Edward Blake: If I come at this from a technologist point of view, I think we're going to see a ramping up of expectations from both clients and investment professionals. So, we've seen over the last decade, increasingly data becoming important. I think we're going to see an expectation from clients and investment professionals to have that data organised, delivered well, delivered fast, delivered in that they can use it. But also, I think that's now going to pass on to our clients. I think the client expectation is increasing to have accurate data to understand their wealth proposition. 

You can look at this from a complexity point of view. I think client expectations are going to increase. I think their requirements are also going to become more complex. So we may increasingly see whole of wealth propositions, which will have a globalised view.

Caroline Deutsch: You've talked a lot about the end customer there, Waverton’s client. Quite interested because I've seen that Waverton has won awards and been quite well recognised for your end customer technology.

Edward Blake: Yeah, Waverton approaches the client experience from the back to the front. So that's from how we service the client from their onboarding point of view, how we service the client through their journey, to actually deciding the products that they're going to choose right through to the portfolio manager keeping them up to date on market conditions, what's the state of their portfolio, their performance. That's a back to front proposition. Technology plays a part in that. So, of course, we are looking to make sure that we've got an efficient experience for our portfolio managers, but also trying to look at the client user experience and think, what is it our clients need? How often do they need it? We want to make sure that the clients are serviced as efficiently and with as little friction as possible.

Caroline Deutsch: And how do you think that's going to change? Because we're talking about the future here, so that's what Waverton’s doing now or driving towards. How do you think that might change?

Edward Blake: I think if you look at it from a client's point of view, I think you're going to see you continuance of client's expectation increasing. So I think we've had 20 years of digital transformation going on in the wealth management industry where over the last 10 years we've seen the use of data and the quality of data really ramp up, actually just to say from a regulatory point requirement as well as a client requirement. So the increasing use of data and the quality of data has continued. But I think clients experience digital infrastructure and digital capability everywhere in their lives. Wealth managers are increasingly aware of this. They want to deliver quality service from their investment proposition. But how we pass that message onto the client, how we do that in a timely, accurate, secure way is only going to increase. And I think you see this through the sophistication of clients, the questions they're asking of portfolio managers, which in turn get asked of technologists and of operating colleagues. 

So I think I'm looking at it from the point of view of client expectation being supported actually somewhat by the regulator and how we make sure that we meet that client's expectation whilst ensuring that we're doing that in a safe, secure, and accurate way.

Caroline Deutsch: Great. Sounds to me like the role of CTO in a wealth manager is getting increasingly important.

Edward Blake: I think it's difficult. You don't want to, when we talk about technology and wealth management, for a period of time, technology was something that just helped people do something a little bit quicker. It helped perhaps add a little bit of value to the client by increasing our reporting capability.

It's now impossible to be a wealth manager without a technology proposition that supports increasingly complicated requirements of both clients, investments and regulators. So if we look at it from the regulator point of view, we can see with consumer duty the amount of data that's required to ensure that we are looking after our clients fairly. If you look at it from an investment proposition point of view, increasingly complicated investment. You've got different asset classes, you've got globalisation, you've got coming down the pipeline, and increasingly digital landscapes, that's stable coins or any form of digital assets if you like. And then you've got the client where a client has a digital experience outside of wealth management that is smooth one-click shopping, banking, open banking, et cetera. And wealth managers can no longer hide behind that technology is too hard. We have to be at the front of thinking about the client requirements, thinking about the investment manager requirements, thinking about the regulator requirements and saying technology will solve these problems. It is not ancillary to the business. It is central to our proposition.

Caroline Deutsch: So what about AI? You can't go anywhere to any publication without reading about what the impact of AI is going to be on all sorts of industries and all sorts of jobs. But thinking specifically now about wealth management, what do you think the impact of AI will be say in the next decade?

Edward Blake: I'm going to cheat slightly here. So I think we can all see that AI has an incredible amount of possibilities and we're seeing that already. But I think what the biggest thing that this is going to impact wealth management, and I think we're seeing it a little bit, is I don't think anybody at any position in any firm can any longer ignore technology as a requirement for the overall proposition of your business. And I think in a company like Waverton, we've acknowledged this early through over the last decade, increasingly looking after data, ensuring its accuracy. But I think now that AI has transcended,  where maybe the accuracy and timeliness of data was somewhat considered secondary, it is now paramount in order to make sure that going forward wealth managers can leverage the oncoming capabilities of technologies such as AI.