Author: Cedric Neuville, Head of Delivery, Wealth Dynamix – wealth-dynamix.com

Despite the acceleration of Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions in recent years, many private banks and wealth management firms still ask us what the difference is between CLM and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and what impact they can have on efficiency.

CRM vs. CLM – How do they differ?

Simply put, CRM preserves client data, while CLM preserves the client. From prospecting to onboarding, to account management to servicing, and finally to re-engagement, CLM creates a 360-degree client view that enables you to serve clients in an intelligent and friction-free way. CLM solutions capture the right amount of data, at the right time, and generate insights into client preferences that enable you to make personalised next best recommendations, every step of the way.

Time is a critical factor that influences every aspect of a relationship manager’s work. Time to identify and nurture new prospects. Time to spend onboarding new clients. And time spent managing clients to maximise satisfaction and increase loyalty. CLM solutions digitise processes and tasks across the entire client lifecycle, automating manual administration work and giving time back to relationship managers, so they can focus on quality of service and revenue growth.

Driving onboarding efficiency

Consider onboarding as an example. Notoriously one of the most labour-intensive, error-prone and tiresome processes for both relationship managers and clients, onboarding can be transformed by CLM solutions into a fast and seamless affair.

• Data capture and re-use
  Although data is the lifeblood of effective relationship management, data capture and validation can be a burdensome process requiring a great deal of back and forth between the client and the firm, and a lot of duplication.

CLM solutions eliminate the need to capture the same data multiple times, saving time and energy for all involved. By applying a ‘capture once, use many’ approach, data captured during initial engagement is automatically fed into the onboarding process, supplemented by the vast quantity of data required to satisfy KYC and compliance requirements, and then routed into downstream processes and used to personalise every client’s journey, consistently across your business.

• Intelligent Know Your Client (IKYC)
  The extensive checks required to identify every prospective client, and verify every identity, can take weeks or months. This aspect of onboarding can prove frustrating. Clients may blame extended delays on the inefficiency or your team and become disillusioned at the very start of your journey together. And relationship managers, who are eager to accelerate time to revenue, want to get approval to begin investment planning, as early in the cycle as possible.

CLM solutions can dramatically cut onboarding times through continuous, automated compliance checks and digitised IKYC. Millions of items of data are captured daily, across websites, new archives, company information and watchlists. Routine, labour-intensive searches are converted into simplified, automated workflows, and unstructured data such as negative news is transformed by powerful analytics into intelligent insights, which enable analysts to prioritise risk and expose threats. The result? More intelligence with AI removing false positives, faster and at lower cost.

• Automated data entry
  Every minute or hour that a relationship manager spends transposing meeting notes, summarising conversations, and entering data into the CRM is a minute or hour they could be spending servicing a client. Lack of time to deliver premium client service can lead to loss of wallet-share, increased attrition, and high cost-income ratios, so wasted time can prove detrimental to AuM growth.

CLM solutions offering data entry via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or automated audio transcription tools can digitally pre-populate fields on a form, or within a CRM, saving countless hours of time and freeing relationship managers to focus on more proactive work, which can yield profitable returns.

Onboarding is just one phase of the client lifecycle that has benefitted significantly from a technology-driven approach to CLM. To remain competitive, relationship managers need to be empowered to focus on qualitative engagement strategies and client-facing activity, and the only way to do this is to spend less time manually finding, entering and quantifying data.

Now, and in the future, I believe that successful wealth managers will embrace end-to-end CLM platforms that span the entire client lifecycle, present data in a form that relationship managers can make sense of, and deploy smart workflows that route the right data to the right place, at the right time.