Wealth Manager Leverages Custom Dynamics 365 Applications to Deliver a Better Customer Experience

Wealth Management is traditionally known for being a high-touch competitive industry, however in order to maintain this position they will need to find ways to digitize their client experience. Traditional retail, private, and investment banks are competing with FinTech’s, trading firms, brokerages, and others to win more customers and grow their share of the market. Financial advisors typically charge a percentage of assets under management and can sell auxiliary services, such as insurance, making wealth management a highly profitable enterprise. In the U.S. alone wealth managers held $38 trillion under management in 2021 and enjoyed a 22% pretax margin. 

Wealth Management leaders know that their industry is changing fast. They’re continuing to serve more diverse clients, including more women, younger individuals, and self-made business professionals. These clients aren’t afraid to detether and move to other providers if they’re dissatisfied. As a result, financial services firms continue to invest heavily in digital services to enhance both the Financial Advisor and the client experience. These investments include modern dashboards that enable clients to monitor holdings and investment decisions, as well as offer tools with the ability to allow Financial Advisors to respond to “nudges” to take key actions, and most importantly use scenarios to model the impact of different financial decisions.  

It was against this industry backdrop that Concurrency began working with a Fortune 100 multi-national financial services firm. The goal was to surface data, use customized client profiles, and equip its financial advisors with digital tools to better serve their clients. By automating the standard of care, advisors could offer personalized advice and enable wealth management clients to maximize the right opportunities. This also allowed the firm to guide and train a best practice way to grow and maintain top financial advisors.  

“Like other firms, our private wealth management operation is digitizing the client experience and automating key processes,” says the product owner for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at the firm. “We wanted to give our financial advisors better visibility and insight into their client’s needs, optimize touchpoints, and provide integrated access to financial strategies and tools, while still providing customization capabilities.”   

About the Client 

• US-headquartered, multi-national firm 
• Offers wealth and asset management, investment banking/capital markets, and private equity services 
• More than $400B assets under management  

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to Deliver Better Wealth Management Services

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of intelligent business applications that provides end-to-end capabilities across sales and marketing, service delivery, finance, and supply chain. By so doing, it eliminates the data silos that can occur between traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, while providing data and digital processes that enable teams to adapt and innovate. Private wealth management firms like our client can use Dynamics 365 to guide advanced planning, investment consulting, and relationship management, delivering a higher level of service.  

The firm was already using Dynamics and had a standard of care model in place. However, advisors were entering client data manually, which led to errors, duplicate information, or missing data. Advisors also kept knowledge in locally stored spreadsheets, on notepads, and other tools. As a result, there was no way to track, scale, or communicate data and offerings across the department or view client touchpoints holistically.  

The Structure of Their Offerings 

Having worked with Concurrency previously, the Dynamics 365 lead chose us to automate their standard of care model.

We began by conducting interviews with advisor teams to understand their needs with segmenting clients, automatically populating standard of care models with data, tracking strategies and activities, and optimizing service. With this insight, we worked with our client to: 

• Group financial offerings by three primary client segments: Essential, Core, and Advanced 
• Create a standard CRM form to ensure a consistent intake of data  
• Provide customization capabilities, to enable advisors to tailor offerings to client needs  

With a standard framework in place, the wealth management group would be able to use consistent processes to onboard and manage clients and scale more easily. In addition, the firm would gain better visibility into client data and activities.  

Using Power Apps to Enable Better Client Service   

Financial advisors spend much of their time meeting with clients, either via video conference or in person. During this time, they gather data, complete standard of care activities, present and fine-tune scenarios in real-time, and share progress updates. In situations like this, it may not be desirable or feasible to launch Microsoft Dynamics 365 and navigate screens.  

Concurrency worked with the wealth management group to develop a user-friendly interface that enabled advisors to access client data and operate service models with a minimum of clicks. In addition, advisors can use powerful advanced filtering and search tools to find what they need, such as records of transactions or customer documents. The interface used a Canvas App to connect to Microsoft Power Apps, while still connecting to Dynamics-based data and processes.  

Power Apps are low-code apps that can be developed by business users and deployed quickly, speeding the pace of innovation.  

We developed the interface quickly but then spent time connecting it to the firm’s existing data model, which contained more than 250K records. After testing the interface and providing a demo to key decision makers, we launched it to the advisor workforce.   

Advisors can now seamlessly: 

• Review all client data, activities, and records in a single interface  
• Work through and document key client activities, as determined by the segment-driven standard of care 
• Easily report on client status and activities  

The digital standard of care model not only helps advisors deliver better service but supports the firm in the event they leave. New advisors can access client profiles, quickly and easily review data, and continue providing customized outreach and services. 

Rolling Out the New Standard of Care  

After trialing the new standard of care with focus group teams, the financial services firm has rolled it out to all advisors. The firm has chosen not to mandate use. Instead, the product owner is highlighting newly streamlined processes and customization capabilities to encourage advisors to adopt it.  

With integrated data, automation, and consistent processes, the wealth manager will be able to provide the customized service clients covet, while more easily and cost-effectively scaling to handle new business.  

Improve the Customer Experience with Dynamics 365

Want to improve the customer experience with integrated data and automated processes? Contact us at sales@concurrency.com to learn more.