Stephen Wall: «Private Banking is Taking Tech Baby Steps»

Private banks have technology at their fingertips, but are often loath to use it, consultant Stephan Wall tells finews.asia. He outlines how private banks can navigate the shifting tech landscape.

Stephen Wall, there’s never been as much technology targeted specifically to wealth managers. Why aren’t they making use of it?

One aspect is there's more technology in the market that they haven't been used to seeing. So to some extent they’ve got to take baby steps towards technology.

Why?

Historically, technology was quite expensive, wasn’t so easy to use and didn't necessarily integrate well so firms would want to buy technology maybe once every five or ten years. They're not used to this more integrated model where they can bring things in quickly.

What’s changed specifically?

Technology is «built for wealth,» which means fintech and wealthtech providers are really going for specific niches. For example, client onboarding, data management, client portals, portfolio management solutions – these tools are often now built specifically for wealth management, including niches like external asset managers.

What about culturally – tech and wealth management isn’t exactly been a love story.

Especially the smaller ones approached it as «we do things manually, through relationships, we talk to our clients, technology is too expensive».

«Most of them are scrambling right now»

A lot of that can now be done with and enabled through technology, but there's still a gap between the kind of technological capability that exists, and the mentality of many wealth managers to adopt it.

Will the pandemic coax wealth managers into making good on that lag in adoption?

How wealth managers communicate with clients and manage their relationship is all going to be much more technology enabled – if only because no one can travel right now. COVID-19 is a short, sharp shock for the time being. Hopefully many wealth managers will realize they need to have an infrastructure that can adapt. Most of them are scrambling right now.