NextWealth Live 2026 – Connecting with customers

Transcript (generated via AI)

Connecting with Customers – Simon Belsham, Hargreaves Lansdown

I’m going to share some of my initial reflections, and hopefully a few things that we can learn to help drive some organic growth in our space. So as Heather said, I’ve spent most of my career persuading people to buy groceries, luxury, gym memberships, fashion that people didn’t really need, and actually occasionally things they absolutely didn’t need at all. And now I get the pleasure of working something that’s much more purpose driven in wealth management.

My background is in consumer businesses, and over the last 25 years, I’ve worked for some of the world’s largest businesses, as well as my own startups along the way, at Tesco, at Walmart, Not On The High Street and Equinox across the US and the UK. So, I’ve had the privilege of seeing consumers all around the world across a really interesting couple of decades of consumer change.

Each of those businesses that I’ve worked at lives or dies by voluntary consumer choice. If customers don’t like the experience, if they don’t trust the brand, if it feels too complicated, then they simply have the choice to go somewhere else. So, every day, we had to fight for our customers. Today, I’m Chief Client Officer at Hargreaves Lansdown. Our purpose is simple: to help Britain build wealth with confidence, and that connects to a much bigger national challenge that I think everyone in this room will really understand and identify with. The UK has a savings problem. We have got too much money sitting in cash and too few people who feel confident about investing. And the advice gap for people to access advice is widening all the time. If we want a nation of investors, we need much more organic growth in our industry, but I don’t believe that growth is going to come from slightly better funds or slightly better wrappers. It’s going to come from something else. And so my argument is that it’s about client connection, and that’s where I believe that consumer businesses have a lot to teach us.

So my first lesson coming into this industry is brand is trust at scale. In retail, we used to talk a lot about moments of truth in the client experience and the client journey. That zero moment of truth is the point when you get hungry and you think about needing some food and where you’re going to go for that. Your first moment of truth is when you get to the shelf edge and you decide whether you want to buy something or abandon the purchase. The second moment of truth is when you consume that product you’ve bought or you wear the clothing that you’ve purchased.

The result of that is at Tesco, when I was there years ago, trust was tested and earned or lost every single day. Was the pricing accurate? Were the shelves stocked? Were the queues reasonable? Was the store clean? Were the staff friendly? Trust moved really, really fast. You could lose it in a day or in a week.

In wealth management, sometimes, I believe we feel that trust is inherited, that in some way it’s an inalienable right that we have earned people’s trust and loyalty, whether it’s from regulation, from heritage, from performance numbers over time. But I really believe that trust in this industry behaves in the same way that it does in retail. It can appear to move very slowly until volatility hits, and then it moves very fast. So we need to think of real moments of truth in the wealth industry: market crashes, volatility like we’re seeing right now, tax events, platform outages, withdrawal requests, bereavement cases, someone transferring their life savings across for the very first time. These are the moments when your brand really matters.

 I know some of us like to use big bells in our advertising and other things. But brand is not your advertising. Brand is how you behave when you’re under pressure. In retail, we used to say that trust is earned weekly, and as I said, in wealth management, we sometimes feel that it’s inherited. But clients don’t experience it that way. Clients don’t think that you’ve earned their trust for the next 10 years. They see it very differently. For them, brand is the emotional shorthand for a simple feeling: “I feel safe”. And if we want a nation of investors, that emotional safety, in my view, really matters. I don’t think people avoid investing because they’ve studied the performance charts and decided that now is not the right time to enter the market. They avoid it because it feels unsafe. So the real question, I think, for our industry is, are we architecting our business for the calm days when everyone’s rational and things look like they’re going in the right direction – or are we architecting it for the crisis days when it really matters to our clients?

My second lesson that I’ve learned through retail, that I think applies to us, is that we don’t sell wrappers, we sell futures. I was fortunate enough, when I was working in the States, to work with a number of the Apple marketing team that used to work with Steve Jobs on a lot of the Apple product launches. And there’s the one famous Apple example first launched the iPod, which I think is quite relevant for some of what we do. They had a choice at the time to market it as 128 gigabyte hard drive that could download MP3s, or, as they chose to do, they could sell 10,000 songs in your pocket.

That’s the difference to me, between selling features and selling meaning. And I saw exactly the same thing when I was in the gym industry at Equinox. We weren’t selling gym access. Gym access is commoditized, pure gyms $10 a month in the States, Planet Fitness, $5 a month. It’s not about access to the equipment. We were selling identity. We were selling a vision of who you could become. Our members weren’t joining a gym. They were becoming someone else, someone aspirational. And I think the wealth industry sometimes makes the opposite mistake. We talk about ISAs and SIPPs and asset allocation and tax wrappers, but clients aren’t thinking about any of those things. I say to my team literally every week, what are clients thinking about? They’re thinking about, will I be okay? Can I look after my kids? Can I stop working when I want to? Can I live the future that I’ve imagined? And I always tell my team that no one dreams of owning a tax wrapper. Actually, some people in this room might, but generally, clients don’t dream of owning a tax wrapper. They aspire to feel secure, and we need to translate our language so it’s much more accessible for them.

Instead of talking about asset allocation, we need to talk about confidence, instead of talking about diversification, we need to talk about resilience. Instead of talking about contributions, we need to talk about progress. And when you show people progress, not just balances, something really powerful happens: they invest a lot more. Organic growth isn’t going to come from our product architecture – it’s going to come from that emotional clarity that we can give to our clients.

My third lesson is that experience is the growth engine in our industry. In retail, experience drives repeat purchase. We’ve all been there. We’ve walked into a shop or bought something online and had a great experience. For whatever reason, we’re very likely to go back there again. Equally, friction kills conversion. You see it immediately. If a checkout in a supermarket is too long, people abandon their basket and walk away. I grew up running supermarkets in Tesco and putting away full baskets of shopping was always a nightmare. So you did what you can to get those queues down.

But in wealth management, friction is everywhere. It’s amazing to me coming into this industry, onboarding friction: we call it KYC and AML. We have names for it, acronyms. There’s transfer friction. It can take 10 to 20 days to move your life earned assets to someone else. Contribution, friction, withdrawal, friction, friction around choosing what investments I want to make, and the cognitive load of all that. We spend a lot of time talking about product innovation, as I already mentioned. But for me, the real, real growth lever is something much simpler. It’s about journey redesign, because, today, distribution is UX and UX is growth. This word distribution was one that really surprised me when I came in. Distribution, for me, is a very utilitarian word. It’s about getting something from A to B, and it kind of implies that actually our app and our web and our help desk is just something very utilitarian.

We treat it that way: we generally have one size fits all experiences. But a new investor journey is not the same as a seasoned investor journey. An investor sitting in cash is not the same as a fully invested client. An accumulator is not the same as someone approaching retirement. If we tailor the experience properly towards our clients, three things are going to happen. We’re going to get greater attention, we’re going to get greater advocacy, and clients are going to naturally want to consolidate more of their wealth with you. Experience isn’t just a service, it’s really a growth engine for our industry.

One of the biggest differences for me, as I’ve come into this space, between retail and wealth management is pace and energy. At Walmart, we had lots of rituals, some of which probably not for now we can talk about later, some crazy chants that we used to do before every meeting. But one thing that was really relevant is we had Saturday morning meetings every week. Now that might sound a nightmare to everyone in this room, but they were really, really important. Senior leaders from across the business would get together and review performance numbers in brutal detail. They weren’t vanity metrics. No one wants to get up early on a Saturday morning and pat themselves on the back. They were about trading reality:  what sold yesterday, what didn’t and why? What have we got to fix next week? Retail runs on these weekly rhythms. They’re the heartbeat of the industry and if you run an entrepreneurial business, they run even faster.

When it’s your own money at stake, you learn something quickly. If you can learn faster than anyone else and improve quicker – that gives you a competitive advantage. Speed of feedback loops is everything when it’s learning. And I think that’s never been more important for our industry, or any other industry, than it is today, with the advent of AI and so much conversation already today about how quickly that’s coming on board.

In wealth management, though, typically we operate things quite differently, quarterly, half-yearly, we have committees, lots of good discussion and debate, some of it really important, obviously, but it can feel quite comfortable. I’ve never actually in 25 years felt comfortable in a business before, but wealth management does feel a bit like that. I believe organic growth for our industry is going to require something else: faster experimentation, shorter feedback loops, and clearer ownership of client metrics, because at the moment, many firms value and measure one thing above all else, and it’s a three letter acronym that I’d never heard of before: AUA. But for me, that’s a lagging indicator. In retail, we manage the basket. What are clients buying every day? Did they have a good experience? What does that do to their lifetime value?

In wealth, we sometimes just admire the balance, and we don’t look beneath that. The real growth indicators for me are things like client activation, repeat funding, advocacy, cros- product penetration, client lifetime value, the energy we put into the client relationship matters, and clients can feel it.

Another big stark difference of me coming into this space, having worked largely in e-commerce for 20 years, and seeing technology evolve from fairly monolithic stacks to a world that’s much more cloud-based API first, headless and composable. But coming into the wealth management industry, it’s really clear that our technology is archaic. Retail operates in real time: personalised pricing, dynamic baskets and promotions, frictionless checkout. But in wealth we still see: batch processing, delays to data by several days before we know what’s going on, legacy architecture, clunky transfers that can take days to get through.

Of course, wealth management operates under strict regulation. There’s some good reasons for some of that, and rightly so, because we are managing people’s life savings, and we have to do it responsibly and safely. But in my mind, regulation doesn’t prevent clarity, it doesn’t prevent empathy, and it doesn’t prevent good experience design. In fact, those are the principles of consumer duty at its heart. Sometimes we hide behind regulation in advancing what could be a better consumer experience. In many cases, the biggest barriers to better client experiences aren’t regulation. They’re legacy systems, legacy thinking and probably legacy cultures in many of our businesses.

Technology doesn’t just create efficiency, it shapes emotion. A slow platform creates anxiety, a transfer that takes 10 days with your life savings disappearing off one platform before it appears on another, creates fear. But a clear dashboard can create confidence. A good example from my career comes from Tesco’s club card. People often thought club card was genius at Tesco, because it was about data, and data is clearly a big part and at the heart of how it works. But what Club Card did was driving behaviour of our customers. The magic wasn’t the database. The magic was the moment when a customer received through the post vouchers for something that they bought the week before. Now we all scroll Instagram and Tiktok today, and we’re a bit freaked out by bringing something up that we were talking about only five minutes ago. So we’ve all got a bit more used to that degree of personalization. But 20 years ago, that was magic when you got vouchers for a discount on something you bought last week through the post.

Suddenly clients and customers felt understood and familiar for wealth here, data without action is just expensive storage. Personalization isn’t about Dear David or Dear Simon. It’s about relevance at those moments of truth: contribution nudges, cash prompts, portfolio reassurance during volatility, life stage guidance. For me, the best use of data isn’t about prediction, it’s about prompting, and those prompts will drive organic growth, more contributions, less churn and more consolidation.

One final lesson for me from consumer businesses is that simplicity wins. In retail, we had a rule that if customers don’t understand something in three seconds, they don’t buy it. And actually, in a world of doom scrolling, I think we’ve got less than three seconds now to sell to our clients. In wealth management, complexity is sometimes worn as sophistication. Probably wealth management and legal are the only two industries I’ve seen that take pride in complexity as a strategy.  But complexity creates hesitation and hesitation kills growth. Confusion and complexity are not strategies when it comes to consumers. If we want a nation of investors, we have to make investing feel normal, accessible, understandable – not elite. Simplicity scales, but complexity doesn’t.

So if I take a step back from all of that and think about the industry opportunity, organic growth in wealth management won’t, in my mind, come from better model portfolios. They can help drive marginal returns around the edges. But it IS going to come from making investing emotionally safe, culturally normal and behaviorally easy, and that’s going to require three things of us.

• First, treating brand as trust infrastructure – being there for clients at the moments that matter, those moments of truth.
• Second, selling life outcomes not product features – talking to them about their goals and in their language.
• And thirdly, running the businesses with retail-grade commercial discipline, because I believe the firms that are going to win over the next decade aren’t just going to be managing money, they’re going to be managing client relationships.

Heather: One of the things I hear sometimes is that a bit of friction is good to protect customers. Is there a place for some friction in our industry?

SB:  One of the phrases I’ve learned since being here is this phrase of positive friction, right? Because I do agree. I think there are, there are certainly journeys or products where you need clients to take a breath and make sure they thought and understood and educated and considered before they buy that. But I wouldn’t hide behind that or get that confused with creating accessible, understandable, safe experiences.

Audience: If you were putting yourself in a customer’s shoes today, from what you’ve learned in nine months and imagine you can ignore the FCA, what would you rip up?

SB: The whole lexicon. Honestly, I really do think that’s a good place to start with. Generally, in my career, I’ve learned if you talk to people about their needs and their wants, then you’ve got a good start of actually engaging them in doing something about their financial futures. We talked a bit earlier about risk warnings, and we’ve been quite vocal about simplifying risk in the industry, I think that sort of thing is really important. But I think making products and outcomes accessible and understandable by people. That’s probably where I would start.

Shivan: So you talked about trust, and I think that’s a very big thing when you especially something about money, right? Because everyone just wants to hold on to their money and keep it safe. So you said, Trust moves slowly until it moves fast. What does it look like when it moves fast in the wrong direction, and what do you do in that scenario to recover the trust?  

SB: I’d often talk about, in previous lives, about trying to turn these challenging moments into hero moments. I think a big part of what we’ve got to do is be there for clients at moments. If you think about those challenging moments in people’s lives – bereavements, being, you know, a really difficult one, market crashes, seeing your pension and life savings suddenly lose tremendous amounts of value in the kind of the panic that that can create – I think that’s where the brand comes in, and how we interact with you, how we provide you support, how we provide you education, how we provide you content, how we put in the right positive friction at those moments as well so we don’t make irrational decisions. That’s the responsibility of the brand. That’s why I talk about architecting our business for crisis days rather than calm days, and we’ve got to be prepared for those, because they’re going to happen all the time. And I think that’s where we earn trust. If we’re there for our friends, our family at the difficult times, then they’re going to stick with us for longer. And so for me, it’s about it’s not one thing. I think it’s about how we use our whole businesses joined up in an aligned way to be there for clients in the moments they need us.

Audience: There’s a lot of discussion about trust, and we’re building products services that we think clients need. I think is probably how I would put it. But is there an opportunity for the industry to create consumer brands that people want? I think it’s probably the way I’d think about it. If banking can create sort of services that people want. They want a metal card, they want a Coutts account. Is there an opportunity for that? And if so, how do we do it?

SB: I mean, the whole concept of branding is interesting. I worked for Ocado years ago. I remember Tim Steiner, the CEO there, taught me. He basically said you can call a company anything, right? He did. He called it Ocado. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s about the experience that you wrap around it. And so  I would probably counter that and say, we probably all have brands that work today, but it’s how we create those experiences. And I think a bit to your question as well. I think one of the challenging things for us now is joining up all the dots so we can speak to a client or a customer in a really connected and cohesive way. That’s some of the hard stuff, I think, about building brands of the future. When customers are going to LLMs and their friends and family and they’re getting advice and guidance and education from lots of different places, how do we make sure we show up consistently wherever they encounter us? So for me, it’s less about the, you know, the Sonics and mnemonics and the kind of the visuals and all of that. It’s about how we show up for our clients consistently.

HH: People who have received financial advice understand the value of it, yeah, but people who haven’t experienced it don’t understand the value, and in fact, many of them have quite a negative view. And it’s a real challenge, isn’t it, to get to get people to understand what it is that we do as an industry. As somebody who’s come from retail, what the customers is buying from Hargreaves Lansdown?

SB:  Confidence and you go back to that word ‘trust’ again, and you’ll see from from our recent advertising campaigns. You know, the 45 years this year, since the business was founded, we’ve been through all sorts of ups and downs, bubbles and bursts and peaks and troughs. And it’s that consistency and reliability of being, that feeling of emotional safety that I talked about as well. For me, those are the important things when we’re investing for the long term. We’re investing for our retirement investing for our kids, futures. You don’t want to be going necessarily in and out the whole time, and so you’re buying someone that gives you that confidence for the longer term. And I think that that, for me, is, you know, a huge part of what we’ve got to convey to clients.