CREALOGIX Managing Director APAC on Delivering Technology-Enabled Super-Personalisation in Wealth Management

Since Karsten Kemna took the reins as Managing Director of CREALOGIX for the Asia Pacific region in April 2020, he has been working hard to refine the focus of the Swiss Top 100 FinTech in the region. The firm develops and implements innovative FinTech solutions for financial institutions, including wealth management, retail banking and corporate and SME banking. Karsten was an expert panellist at our Hubbis Digital Dialogue event of November 18 that focused on the thrust to technology-enabled hyper-personalisation in the Asian wealth management market. Karsten offered a variety of valuable perspectives to delegates, which we have summarised in this short report.

The CREALOGIX Group describes itself as a multinational digital transformation specialist and a Swiss FinTech Top 100 company, as well as one of the market leaders in digital banking. The firm develops and implements innovative FinTech solutions for the digital bank of tomorrow, and while its roots are coming from the wealth management industry, it also offers digital solutions for both retail banking as well as corporate banking/SME type environments. The firm’s focus is very much on evolving the providers’ and the end customers’ needs for digitalisation in a secure and personalised way within a comprehensive user experience.

Karsten has been driving the strategic development of CREALOGIX in this dynamic Asian growth market and will continue to drive CREALOGIX’s group-wide expansion and transformation to become the leading global provider of Digital Banking SaaS software in the region.

Three key trends

He opened his comments with the support of a few slides for delegates. He first explained that the firm sees three key topics as crucial to the evolution of client-centricity, namely hybrid advice, hyper-personalisation and ubiquitous banking.

Hybrid advice centres around digitalisation to make client advice more efficient in the future, with a smaller number of RMs delivering more depth and breadth of services thanks to that technology, and with human touch and relationships driving the business forward.

Hyper-personalisation is all about the delivery of hyper-personalised advice, where relationship managers provide highly tailored, specific advice, at the same time scaling it while preserving context and relevance, and thereby providing a truly unique, engaging, and highly customised experience.

And ubiquitous banking involves the provision of banking services anywhere anytime, including the integration of banking services into third-party contexts (such as third-party apps, in stores and so forth), with the integration done by third parties or the banks themselves.

Key drivers for super-personalisation

Having set that backdrop, Karsten offered the attendees the CREALOGIX vision of five key areas in which wealth management players can personalise wealth services via technology and the available digital channels.

First, banks and WM firms should capture data using digital onboarding tools for standardised information that can be reflected back to the client in a clear dashboard. Secondly, they should offer clients the choice of whether to switch to paperless services and their communication preferences via email, telephone, online and in person.

Thirdly, they should respect their clients’ values with clear ESG and Impact Investing reporting that shows the results of their preferences. Then use the data held on clients to deliver a personalised news feed based on their interests, push notifications for relevant investment opportunities and tailored updates via relevant webinars. And finally, financial institutions should track user journeys and use AI-supported conversational prompts to assist users and identify the points in a user journey when personal intervention can add value.

Karsten offered delegates further insights and additional commentary on these advisories.

“We see the three key trends of hybrid advice, hyper-personalisation and banking anywhere and anytime as the drivers of evolution in the wealth industry,” he said. “Clients engage with us on all these three core trends to discuss how technology solutions can help them deliver in those areas. And today, we are really focusing on hyper-personalisation, but within the context of those other two key trends.”

Tailored, specific, bespoke

He reiterated that the hyper-personalisation element is really all about providing highly tailored specific advice for wealth management customers, making it highly contextual and relevant. “And it must still be engaging so that the people that you're working with or that you're talking to don't feel that they are just somebody at the end of the food chain, but that they are treated with individuality and empathy, that they are genuinely worthwhile as customers.”

Get it right from the start…

He explained that digital and AI help drive hyper-personalisation, and that in terms of bringing the personal touch into these digital channels, it really is an end-to-end approach to achieve personalisation. He explained that it is important to begin right from the outset, to use digital channels for onboarding so that the providers are able to start that important relationship with customers through the mobile phone, start a relationship through the e-channels based on standardised information, and also maintain this approach all the way towards KYC and checking as well as the signing of documents.

“You can give the clients the choice as to how they want to communicate with you,” he said, “as it is vital to make them comfortable with the approach, perhaps the old-fashioned way with paper, or the more technological approaches via smartphones, online and so forth. What you also do is you allow your clients to focus and you allow your clients to really decide in which direction they want to make their investments with sustainability topics, with impact investment, ESG, and other key considerations, and by the way, these are also crucial and highly relevant in the Islamic banking space.”

Customising the messages

He explained that based on AI and the provider’s experiences with their customers, they could customise and personalise their news feeds, they can ‘push’ relevant notifications, but at the same time, also find ways to structure and deliver these relevant notifications in ways that customers would help the clients become more receptive, or willing, to buy a product or service from that bank or wealth management firm. “It is a two-way flow,” he said.

He then added that the delivery centres back on the hybrid wealth management approach he had referred to earlier.

Hybrid delivery via mobile, tailored to specific markets

“Hybrid combines the right mixture of how you communicate or how you converse,” he elucidated.

“On the one side trying to do an entire end to end chain on the mobile phone but being able either through a chat function or through a quick phone call or WhatsApp call on the device to assist users and identify pain points where maybe they are stuck, or maybe they need additional information. In short, this is a hybrid between personal intervention while in the background, most of the value chain is truly automated.”

Karsten then offered further commentary on the role of hybrid advice. “Especially in places such as Southeast Asia, where we have rapidly changing demographics and a fast-growing middle class, this segment becomes an increasingly attractive market segment, but the reality is banks and firms in this market will not have enough relationship managers to really cover all the new people that might become into the affluent spaces,” he observed. “At the same time, the younger rich from Indonesia, for example, they would still expect fully digital wealth management, while maybe their peers from the Western Hemisphere, they would expect much more personal connectivity, the coffee-chat type of advice. So the delivery of advice must be tailored to the markets in which one operates.”

Winning the battles

Another issue, he explained, is that the limited capability of the relationship managers is both numerical – banks and firms cannot afford to hire limitless numbers – and also from a skills, experience and knowledge shortfall perspective. He pondered: “Can those RMs know exactly what their banks or firms are offering and relay advice properly to their clients, or are the clients often more knowledgeable and aware, and therefore prefer to find other ways of conducting their business rather than through the RMs?”

To answer his rhetorical question, Karsten added that it is important to plug the gaps between objectives and realities. “How can we improve? How can we make sure that the quality of the engagements continues to improve?” he asked. “Because the end customers, they do have more and more choice, meaning that it is really elementary that you have certain differentiation factors in order to be able to survive in this war to win and retain your customers.”

Data-driven relevance

He said that keeping things as relevant as possible was central to this. “Data should be managed such that the advice and ideas are completely relevant,” he stated. “If I like to invest, for example, in US stocks, I don't need information about Japanese bonds, so it is partly the availability of data and partly filtering data so that you are utterly relevant. You then make sure you package and deliver it in a way that it is both digestible and really interesting for somebody to follow through and hopefully make a purchase with you.”

Step-by-step

Karsten closed his observations with some recommendations. “With technology, we advise clients to avoid the ‘big bang’ approach and start smaller, for example, start with a certain product and get the customer base attracted to and interested in that, and then build on it and become more and more in line with their objectives. Secondly, don't try to do everything by yourself, as there are very knowledgeable firms in the market that have top class experience and credentials all the way in the value chain from a retail/affluent type client focus, to UHNW private banking clients. And it is essential to tailor your approaches to the often very different markets in Asia. For example, Vietnam is totally different from Singapore, which of course is far more developed in all these areas.”