For the purposes of this blog post, the Wealth Management industry in the UK is comprised of two separate sets of practitioners: Advise-only and Execution-only.

As the name suggests, 'advice-only' Wealth Managers focus on delivering guidance and advise to their clients. In contrast, Execution only Wealth Managers are concerned with the buying and selling of financial products. These financial products are typically savings, investment and pension products such as bonds, funds and equities.

Over the years, industry bodies such as Financial Conduct Authority has mandated high levels of regulatory compliance from practitioners working within the Wealth Management industry and processes.

In the blog, we've identified three processes that can make a positive impact in terms of increased compliance, reduced reliance on expensive resources to perform low-value tasks and reduction in time/effort to execute. All these factors combine to improve Customer Experience and Compliance - both essential factors in Wealth Management.

Advice Only Wealth Managers are required to perform an annual and systematic review of the status of their clients to ensuring that accurate information is used when planning investments, savings and pension provision. One of the issues with Fact Finding is ensuring that it is completed before timely client engagement.

Many Wealth Managers resort to traditional approach of a face-to-face interview and manual recording of key information. This process is often tedious for the client and extremely time consuming for the Wealth Management practitioner's team. This approach also has knock on factors too, such as - 1. poor data through a break-down of communication or re-keying, 2. a wasted opportunity for the Wealth Manager who can use the time to discuss more important topics.

Advice Only Wealth Managers can use Intelligent Automation to bridge the gap between the way their clients want to present their information and the Wealth Manager’s back end systems. This may vary from client to client. For example - some clients may prefer a web portal questionnaire that presents current information on file and an opportunity to amend.

Alternatively, some clients may prefer to complete an excel spreadsheet. Others may prefer traditional pen & paper approach that’s posted in. Wealth Managers can’t be over-prescriptive from a client process perspective but do need to collect accurate data. Kofax Intelligent Automation allows Wealth Managers to strike the right balance in requesting their client’s investment in the Fact-Finding process so that more time can be devoted to discussion and delivering the correct advice and guidance.

In contrast, non-Advice Wealth Managers are focused on transacting deals for a range of financial services investment products; many of these 'execution only' Wealth Managers rely on platforms as a mechanism for consumers to easily transact with them. The platform approach provides Wealth Managers with the capability to manage large portfolios of clients that have straight forward needs, platforms essentially provides virtualisation of tasks such as quoting, selling and buying that were formerly performed by front office personnel.

Clients of Non-Advisory Wealth Managers with more complex needs are handled by nominated individuals who are supported by a team that can trade on behalf of their clients. In all cases, the Non-Advisory Wealth Managers business is predicated by ability to execute and provide information on a non-advice basis.

Here, Kofax Intelligent Automation enables the rapid but robust linkage between multiple back-end systems, can automatically classify, index and rank inbound correspondence as well as avoid the need for human resources to transpose data from system generated excel spreadsheets or PDF reports directly into back-end systems. Additionally, the solution delivers this with highest levels of cross-checking and verification that help eliminate traditional data-entry errors.

Finally, processes such as on-boarding new clients, reporting & compliance are critical factors for the Wealth Management market. A Kofax Intelligent Capture solution can drive interactions with clients directly, along with capturing, processing and verifying critical documents automatically and in many cases, without the need for human involvement. Kofax Intelligent Automation's RPA was designed to consolidate data from disparate and often hard to reach sources, and update systems & operate 24x7 with considerable operational bandwidth to scale - to meet the busiest times of the year with ease.