Linking with clients online

The wealth man­age­ment com­mu­ni­ty has arguably been slow­er than oth­er pro­fes­sion­als in adopt­ing these mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques, but this seems to be chang­ing.

Gra­ham Aikin, an asso­ciate at Bizlinks, a firm which offers social-media train­ing and advice, says there is now a “greater aware­ness that the wealth man­age­ment indus­try needs to be involved with social media”.

For some time the sec­tor has had a pres­ence on LinkedIn, but this is often lit­tle more than an exten­sion of an individual’s con­tact book. Now firms are wak­ing up to oppor­tu­ni­ties of social media, but there is still a dan­ger of it becom­ing a “box-tick­ing” exer­cise in which firms estab­lish a pres­ence on the major social-media web­sites yet fail to extract the most from them.

One bank that has a pres­ence on a broad spec­trum of chan­nels is Coutts. It is present on LinkedIn, Face­book, Twit­ter and has its own online por­tal for clients, called Knowl­edge Exchange, as well as an invest­ment blog.

For Coutts, one of the most impor­tant aspects of social media is the abil­i­ty to per­son­alise the infor­ma­tion that clients receive. The bank believes that by log­ging the pref­er­ences of clients via social media, it can use it as a more effec­tive chan­nel to dis­trib­ute mate­r­i­al based on an individual’s inter­ests, although all infor­ma­tion would still be acces­si­ble to all. This acts as a fil­ter and stops a client from receiv­ing a bar­rage of irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion.

Ian Ewart, head of prod­ucts, ser­vices and mar­ket­ing at Coutts, says the bank’s social-media propo­si­tion aims to “start with client needs”. Indeed, the bank has sur­veyed clients on what they want from this method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the process has high­light­ed areas it had not con­sid­ered pre­vi­ous­ly and there­by shaped the propo­si­tion.

Coutts also looks beyond the wealth man­age­ment com­mu­ni­ty for inspi­ra­tion. It believes that it should look at how lux­u­ry brands use these mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels.

The bank uses its social-media pres­ence and dig­i­tal ser­vices, Knowl­edge Exchange for exam­ple, as an exten­sion of the net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties its events offer clients. It can show exist­ing clients the addi­tion­al ben­e­fits avail­able and attract poten­tial clients who want to access these exclu­sive events. Just as social media evolves quick­ly, so too will wealth man­agers make use of it.

The wealth management community has arguably been slower than other professionals in adopting these modern communication techniques, but this seems to be changing.