What Do Young & Wealthy Clients Expect From Their Banks?

1. Hyper-Personalized Digital Experiences

The young, wealthy clients or “Millennials & Gen Y” as they are called, are digital natives and crave customized experiences at a deeper level. The wealthy young cohort also has diverse portfolio interests. According to BCG, "Personalization in banking should not be essentially about selling. It should be about providing bespoke services." It goes beyond just knowing a client’s age, gender and current assets. It's about going the extra mile to offer them tailored financial advice.

For example, one client might be interested in sustainable investing while another might be into cryptocurrencies. There needs to be an ecosystem that regularly learns more about the client. This helps in accumulating as much data as possible to help create & deliver hyper-personalized experiences. In the aforementioned example, the client looking for sustainable investing options should receive content related to ESG insights. Then, the bank can take a step forward and suggest investing in ESG funds. But for that to happen, they need to capture the client's investing preferences correctly.

Ref: Difference between Personalization & Hyper-personalization

And “no” it's not enough to capture these preferences at the time of onboarding. Most probably the bank might have done this exercise when they onboarded her parents. And no one wants their father’s bank! So the only way for the bank to attract these young, wealthy next-generation clients is to offer bespoke, relevant hyper-personalized services and experiences.

2. Wow Moments - Traits That Win Millennials' Hearts

Let’s consider the father-daughter duo again. The daughter has now graduated from an internationally recognized university. She has just taken over a part of the family portfolio of $15 million. Soon after, she gets a call from her Relationship Manager (RM) saying "Hey, it would be my pleasure to continue being your RM. But I would also like to give you the option of selecting any other RM if you wish to". "Wow, this is cool" is what the daughter might say.

The "wow factor" is something that clients remember. In the above instance, even if the existing RM doesn't provide the option of selecting another banker, it's not going to reflect negatively. But a small change in client experience makes a massive change in the client’s perception. The next step in this case, for another "wow factor" could possibly be how the bank allows this rich client to choose how she manages her investments. Would she want the private banker to handhold her at every step, or would she want a complete digital solution to manage her part of the portfolio, or would she like to go with a hybrid approach - a combination of in-person and digital tools?

As per a Capgemini survey, more than 60% of HNIs are dissatisfied with their experiences when it comes to touchpoints like new product services or receiving educational information.

Also, more than 40% of respondents said that a good experience at these touchpoints would strongly improve their overall perception of the bank or wealth management firm.

Ref: Capgemini World Wealth Report

3. Omnichannel Service Focussed On Client Centricity

According to IBM, omnichannel service means enabling interactions across multiple client touch points where intents are captured, insights are derived and conversations are personalized and optimized. In turn, clients get better service because of this client-centricity. Banks and wealth management firms need to move from transaction processing to superior client engagement to stay relevant.

In the above instance, say the daughter plans to buy a new car and visits an Audi showroom. The bank can use location data from its mobile app to forecast future spending. It can automatically share relevant promotional offers about the car with her. This information about the client should also be made available to her RM. 

As a result, the RM can call or talk to her client to see if she liked the car, and if not, the bank can help her find promotional offers from other brands. The essence of this exercise is to help the client believe that the bank always cares about her needs, even though she did not take it up with her bank. Experiences like these, tie the insights gleaned from one channel to proactively offer personalized service and strengthen the HNI client-RM relationship.