The company surveyed 3,012 affluent to ultra-high-net-worth investors as well as 341 wealth management professionals in 11 European, Asian and Middle Eastern markets.

The report offers unique insight into the way that technology is shaping both the front and back office of firms as well as the expectations of investors when it comes to services from wealth advisers.

The wealth management industry anticipates that AI will have a positive impact with 82% “believing it will benefit the industry”. But there is frustration at the pace of change and adoption of new technologies with many respondents suggesting that “automation is not being implemented fast enough to support their work”.

This is coupled with frustration with existing technology systems and applications with a majority of respondents agreeing with the following statements about the tools they are using:

• The navigation is unclear or unintuitive (59%).
• Data is not seamlessly integrated across all systems (58%).
• Too many tools need to be used to complete a single task (57%).
• The tools contain too many unnecessary functionalities (51%).

There is also a steep learning curve when it comes to the adaptation of new systems and technologies with 44% of wealth managers agreeing that “they take too much time to learn how to use.”

According to the report “investors value quality over quantity in communication.” The results make it clear that investors value clear, prompt and proactive communication above all else with 94% finding it somewhat, very or extremely important that an adviser “responds quickly” to their queries.

Compliance recordkeeping

In what will no doubt be a challenge for compliance teams when it comes to recordkeeping, the expectation of investors is that advisers are “available on multiple channels” including email, in person, phone, instant messaging apps, web and mobile applications – with 83% stating that this was somewhat, very or extremely important.

Proactive sharing of relevant news articles and new product offerings were also highly valued, which suggests that investors place a premium not only on advisers who are well-informed, but those who act as an information conduit to timely and relevant intelligence that is tailored to that specific investor.

But advisers, particularly those based in Asia, struggle to offer more personalized advisory services because of time constraints and because of challenges with both systems and client data accessibility.

But investors globally report that the digital experience provided by their main financial institution of choice is improving with 77% saying that they were satisfied or very satisfied with this.

A possible explanation for this divergence is the fact that financial institutions have been investing heavily in shop front systems, while back-end systems have not received the same attention. As a result the later have not kept pace with the speed of technological improvement and now are misaligned with internal user expectations.