In private wealth management, technological Nirvana is a platform that integrates back-office data in full, giving wealth managers and private bankers a holistic view of their clients, and clients regular, easily accessible updates on their net worth.
Four years ago, TowerGroup argued that a wealth management platform of this kind would make private banking for the affluent more efficient – allowing wealth managers to deliver “private banking lite” to emerging affluent investors with $250,000 to $1 million to invest. Now Tower Group has taken the opportunity to assess what progress the wealth management industry has made towards that ambition.
“To date, financial institutions have made headway by spending aggressively on advice and financial planning tools to equip advisors to deliver wealth management,” says the consultants. “The industry will see greater acceleration in the coming years in the wealth management arena, as financial institutions begin to tackle data integration efforts.” TowerGroup expects spending on wealth management to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.1% from $2.3 billion in 2002, to $3.1 billion in 2008.
In TowerGroup’s new research titled, entitled “The Apocalypse of the Four Models: A Wealth Management Platform Is Still a Vision, But It’s Not ThereYet!,” Matt Schott, a senior analyst in the Retail Brokerage and Investing practice at TowerGroup, discusses the key drivers spurring retail financial services institutions toward the concept of an integrated wealth management platform.
Schott outlines TowerGroup’s wealth management architectural model and the challenges engendered in each of the four solution models identified in prior research relative to supporting technology. Additionally, he provides updates on seven wealth management technology providers with institutional case studies for several of them.