Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) is paramount to relationship managers. It’s about covering the journey you go through with your clients from A to Z. This means you need to orchestrate a variety of systems, staff members, and, of course, clients.
London-based FinTech company Wealth Dynamix, which delivers CLM solutions to the wealth management industry, knows all about it. Recently, it joined forces with Connective to provide an integrated digital signature solution. The goal: to add value to the customer’s front office, their clients’ engagement, and their overall business. In this blog, we’ll have a closer look at what this means in practice. If you’re a relationship manager, how can digital signatures add value to your role?
Ongoing struggle: the time predicament
The most important people in your business are, of course, your clients. But your staff need to offer top-notch service to engage them. Unfortunately, many of them struggle with time, as they tend to get bogged down in simple administrative activities. For example, when contracts need to be signed, they spend a lot of hours filling out forms, putting them in the post, and chasing them down. From time to time, they also have to correct human errors – for instance, when someone sent the wrong document to the client.
Managing contracts, documents, and signatures is a time-consuming endeavor. The problem is, this time should be spent on building new relationships and deepening existing ones. But there are only so many hours in a day.
Reducing this administrative burden on your staff is no luxury. It will allow them to service your clients in a more proactive, engaged way. So, let’s consider what digital signatures can do for you in the four different stages of the CLM.
Prospecting phase
Even prospective clients need to fill out documents. Examples include a risk profile form, a WA you want to get in place very early on, and – if you’re dealing with a higher risk client – forms that require additional details. Usually, you’d pull out the right paper document in the office. Or, when working from home, you’d figure out which PDF to download from SharePoint.
An integrated CLM and digital signature solution helps you identify the documents you need based on what is known about the prospective client: their likely risk level, applicable compliance rules, and the need for terms and conditions (if any). Based on this knowledge, the solution pre-fills the documents and automatically issues them through Connective, so clients can sign them. It saves you loads of time, and you will no longer have to deal with paperwork-related issues, such as documents getting lost in the post.
Onboarding
When onboarding clients, you require a variety of documents – for example, to open accounts or to get additional tax information. In the simplest cases, a client needs to sign anywhere from two to twenty documents. If you have to pre-fill and reconcile them, put them in the post, and keep them up to date, you won’t have much time left to engage the client.What you need is a system that works out what documents you require, pre-fills them, and pushes them into a digital signature solution like Connective, which can then automatically track where you are in the journey. This allows you to check the status of the individual signatures required at any time
Servicing clients
Once clients are onboarded, you’ll start servicing them. This is a key element of an ongoing relationship, especially with (rapidly changing) regulations that may, for example, require documents to be refreshed. If your front office should contact a client, figure out which document to download from SharePoint, and send it manually, everything gets muddled – and, at times, lost.
A better option is to automate these repapering processes. An integrated solution such as that of Connective and Wealth Dynamix automatically highlights when a document expires. You can also use it to drive a new workflow (like the additional collection of ESG information) and push it out to clients automatically, asking them to digitally sign it. Once they’ve done so, you will get all documentation back — without having given the effort a manual process requires!
Building deeper relationships
Re-engaging clients often requires contracts. If, for example, you want to open an ISA, you will need a new account form. And if the client wants to open a trust account or a special purpose investment vehicle, you’ll require lots of new forms to get it done. Here, too, the traditional approach would take a lot of time.Again, paperless is the way to go. An integrated digital signature solution works out which forms you require, pre-fills them, and automatically passes them through to the client, who can sign them in a very frictionless way. The documents are brought back into the system and automatically pushed through to other key members of your staff – from compliance and tax to treasury and client servicing.
And this is how it comes full circle: with the integrated digital signature solution, you will have orchestrated the CLM journey from start to finish. This allows you to focus on what your role is truly about: servicing and engaging clients!
Want to know more about using digital signatures in the wealth management industry?
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