Comarch’s Regional Head on Delivering Digital Transformation to Wealth Management Leaders

The Hubbis Malaysian Wealth Management Forum on April 13 saw Krzysztof Maurer, the Thailand-based Managing Director of Comarch for the region, participate in a head-to-head Q&A with Michael Stanhope, founder and CEO of Hubbis. Maurer is responsible for business growth and driving client success in the Asia Pacific region, and with over 20 years of experience in IT projects in Europe and Asia, he has focused his career on helping banks drive innovation, explore new revenue opportunities, lower operating costs, enhance RM/advisor capabilities, and improve user experience. He updated delegates on how wealth managers are enhancing their digital capabilities, and how Comarch delivers digital transformation to help free up client-facing bankers and advisors and to deliver customized client solutions.

What key areas are wealth managers focusing on currently in their efforts to enhance their digital capabilities?

Krzysztof Maurer: They want to better support their private clients and stay ahead of the competition in terms of their client-centricity and client experience. For example, they are empowering relationship managers with digital tools and solutions to grant personal advice to their clients. On the other hand, they are also improving mobile and online channels dedicated to end-customers, so that they can manage their investments and easily access financial information on the go.

An example of such project we’re working on is with one of the banks in Malaysia, where we are about to implement Comarch Wealth Management, which will help their RMs in managing clients and investments, giving these advisors access to analytics and reports to better monitor sales, performance and portfolios. And the clients themselves will also benefit from it by having access to investment offerings via the mobile app, thereby being able to place orders and approve banker recommendations from the bankers. The Comarch platform also has functionalities such as chat and video conferencing for digital communication between the clients and the bank to support remote customer handling.

Can you explain in a little bit more detail the process of how you help clients with their digital transformation?

Krzysztof Maurer: Comarch has a range of products to support wealth managers to streamline their operations and improve customer experience.

For example, our wealth management platform provides a single integrated view of portfolios, delivers full functionality for mobile investments and monitoring of portfolios. We also provide the tools for portfolio modelling, risk assessment or compliance monitoring to help everyone make investment decisions in a more informed way. For the RMs and advisors, we help them understand their clients better, determine client risk profiles, and then offer products and ideas that are more relevant and suitable.

Comarch is not a fresh start-up, but a vendor with 30 years of experience, with projects all around the world, and a lot of added value to offer, based on our global experience.

We fully respect that each client and each bank have their own needs and requirements. We first need to analyse carefully what these customers want, then offer the right platform and the right levels of customisation. As, for example, the project for Krungsri Bank in Thailand, where we provide the application for RMs that allows them to smoothly follow the advisory journey, starting with suitability questionnaire, in order to identify customer risk profile, and then recommending suitable products for customer investment goals. The main purpose of this application is to help RMs serve their customers in an efficient way, deliver personalized proposals and to keep close to the clients – all to build lasting relationships.

On top of that, Comarch Wealth Management platform is being deployed and hosted in accordance with banks internal procedures and preferences – whether it be on-premises, or in a private or public cloud. As a complete vendor, Comarch offers a wide range of services that support financial institutions in installations, maintenance and security aspects.

Specifically, what can you offer customers that will help RMs be more efficient, more productive, and more satisfied with their roles and achievements?

Krzysztof Maurer: Our mission is to equip bankers with digital capabilities that will allow them to complete an end-to-end investment process within one meeting with a customer, without the need to switch to other systems, or to do any manual work.

The solutions that we are providing automate the more repetitive and mundane tasks, like customer holding aggregation, portfolio rebalancing, compliance monitoring, or order placement. These take a lot of time, but can be easily automated. The RMs then have more time for value-added advice and activities that enhance relationships and allow for a much more personalised communication and services.

We also provide dedicated training for RMs to understand the tools better and to fully utilise all the features.

You and your team are based in Bangkok, and you service the Malaysian market as well. How does that work?

Krzysztof Maurer: We consolidated our teams in Bangkok some years ago, and we have developed that as our regional competence hub for Southeast Asia. This includes not only sales and pre-sales profiles, but also business and technical analysts, as well as support line.

Throughout these couple of years, we have built an interesting and diverse client base in Malaysia and provided wealth management digital transformation projects, along with data centre services. We invite banks and wealth managers from the region to contact us to talk about the challenges and opportunities for transformation in the Wealth Management area