Alan Smith runs a boutique wealth advisory firm in Central London, catering primarily to professionals from the tech, media and creative industries. A tech-savvy client base however doesn’t translate to demand for the latest, slickest, tech solutions…

Alan Smith [AS]: What they value is the personal touch; they’re not too excited about looking at portfolios online. They like to know the information is available, but mostly they want us to be accessible, to be able to get in touch with us and for us to be responsive. It’s about making sure the tech is congruent with your philosophy and client service proposition.  We’re a long-term buy-and-hold investment philosophy company. Trust me, we’ll keep an eye on your investments. As soon as you start getting portfolio valuations on your mobile phone that is a recipe for disaster and there’s evidence to support it. The more times you look at your portfolio, the less you get in returns. As a human being, you won’t be able to help yourself; the minute things aren’t looking good you’ll start doing the wrong thing.

Everyone lives on their mobile phones, and whilst I don’t want people looking at their portfolios online, I do think secure messaging is important. Being able to raise a question, securely transmit attachments, and so on.

NextWealth [NW]: How would you describe your overall experience with technology?

AS: We’ve always been keen to embrace the latest innovations, maybe too much in the past. A lot of emerging tech needs a long time to bed in and what is initially promised is rarely delivered. The overarching issue now is that the tech infrastructure that is available in retail financial services is pretty weak. There are huge gaps in what is required, and a lack of integration, it’s not seamless, a bunch of different pieces of software that don’t speak to each other.

Client onboarding is really hard work; really clunky, really manual and laborious and it is not a beautiful seamless experience from the client’s viewpoint. When you first meet someone, they sign a whole load of forms to give permission to speak to their existing providers, we email those, maybe send them in the post, make a diary note, they’ll be slow in responding, they’ll only send half the information. It all takes weeks if not months.

NW: What would you like to see from the platform and technology providers?

AS: You have to be clear about what you want from a platform and what you expect it to do. We’re plain vanilla. We want high quality administration, efficient trading, good quality reporting. The danger is when the core technology adds on bells & whistles; for example, platforms building a client portal. It’s never going to be best in class.

We spend hours painstakingly putting together the client journey. If the facility could be created using API’s and other emerging tech to allow me and my team to take the client through the entire journey from onboarding to the ongoing relationships, with a series of best in class tech that speaks to each other, all joined up, avoiding duplication, and is accessible to clients, that’s utopia.

The open banking model is interesting; if the client gives us permission, we can then go and obtain all the information we need to build the advice proposition. Instead of writing off, or asking for their income and expenditure, which no one ever really knows, let’s go to where the data sits and extract the information. And similarly, rather than us sending forms to the providers, if they could just provide us access to the client’s data, probably for a limited period of time until we’ve got the information we need, that would smooth the process.

NW: What does the future look like for technology in financial services?

AS: We need to move away from being product-centric and move to being at the centre of a client’s financial life. Remove complexity, remove hassle and give them more time. Finances are dull but important for most people. Create a system and operation that would take care of all those hassles.  Allow you to see where you are on your personal financial plan, are you on track? But also is your household insurance up for renewal? And if you need to speak to someone, you can.  Take care of the low level but important stuff and create more time and capacity to be uniquely human in front of another human.

NW: Can you think of a business in another industry that delivers on this?

AS: The classic example is Amazon. From thinking about something, researching it and having it in your hands within 24 hours or less. That is like witchcraft. It’s a transactional, acquisitional experience rather than a professional services relationship but it’s outstanding and the customer experience is first class. I’ve heard good things about Purple Bricks too. It’s a tech-enabled start-up trying to disrupt a bloated market, using technology supplemented with real life human interaction. It’s worth exploring if they’ve nailed that.

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