The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how businesses relate with their customers. These changes create unique challenges within wealth management firms—moving from a model built on face-to-face client relationships to a remote-first approach. 

As wealth managers make more use of technology to interact with clients, there are several investment performance and reporting approaches you can use to help those relationships run more smoothly.

Tell a Compelling Investment Story with Performance Reporting

Every client’s story is different, and you can bring the investment journey to life through sharing rich and compelling wealth management data. This helps you build your brand, contextualize what you’re sharing with clients, and enhances your communications to focus on what matters to them.

Reporting as a Service (RaaS) makes it easy for you to create unique, customized reports that highlight the history of a client’s investments—explaining how their decisions, your guidance, and financial market conditions have influenced their returns. 

Brand Performance Reports for Recognition

We’ve heard from wealth managers how important it is to deliver branded reports that are clear, consistent, and compelling. They say this builds up recognition and keeps them front-of-mind when clients are thinking about wealth management. 

You can provide these materials before the meeting, and via screen sharing over video conference. This gives your clients a visual reference, which creates a stronger sense of connection to their wealth and how you’re acting as an excellent steward.

Show Your Client’s Investment Strategy Over Time

You will want to tailor each meeting around your client’s needs, so a “one-size-fits-all” report may not be enough. Instead, you can deeply customize wealth management reports to focus on the most important aspects of the client’s investment strategy. For example, one client may be particularly interested in portfolio diversification, while another may only be concentrated on growth and riskier investments. The right type of report allows you to produce data that clients can easily grasp.

Before each meeting, you can generate boardroom-ready reports that focus on the aspects your clients are most interested in. This type of reporting can drive the agenda of the meeting, and with the right technology, you can even pull up other types of reporting immediately to highlight different areas.

Meet All of Your Reporting and Compliance Requirements

Wealth management is one of the most regulated industries, and that means adhering to standards in all of your internal and external reporting. Of course, most of these standards will be invisible to your investors—but you’ll have the confidence that you’re sharing information in a compliant, regulated way using automated reporting configurations and processes that adhere to industry compliance standards and regulations.

In meetings, this means you can share reports with confidence, knowing they meet regulatory standards and provide you and your client with up-to-the-minute, accurate, and reliable data.

“Validate and support your investment strategy with custom report packages that clearly illustrate the pathway to achieving your client’s goals, showing them the compelling story of where they came from and where they are going.” First Rate, RAAS

Develop Future Strategies in Data-Led Conversations

Of course, good wealth management relationships aren’t just based around what’s happened in the past, but also about deciding what to do next. This often involves understanding short-, medium-, and long-term needs and developing strong strategies to meet those goals.

Forecast Possible Trends and How They May Influence Decisions

Data-led reporting can be used to provide reassurance and help combat the current uncertainty in the financial markets. There’s plenty of insight hiding in your wealth management data, so bringing the current situation to life and showing how you’re using that to guide future strategy can help instill confidence.

You can build on that further and use wealth management data modeling and AI to predict possible future outcomes, and how that may influence decisions. Customized reporting helps you develop “What If?” scenarios for consideration. Some platforms will provide deep insight into your data to help you assess and evaluate large datasets and ensure the quality of your information.

Use these forecasts and possible scenarios to talk through wealth management approaches. 

Tailor Reporting Around Specific Client Strategies

Client expectations are changing, and it can be helpful to offer investment strategies that align with client interests and preferences. You can tailor your reporting to show how various investment strategies have performed in the past or might perform in the future.

One good example is “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) or “Impact” investing—allowing clients to buy stocks in companies that have positive ratings for environmental and other policies. There are already a number of mutual funds that offer some varieties of impact investing, but implementing a practical approach to ESG Management, you could easily tailor these further, allowing a mix of products that meet more granular client needs.

“An increasing focus on environmental stewardship, concerns about global supply chains, and climate change means investors are increasingly putting principles in front of profits. Offering investment products that allow for more ethical choices taps into that demographic.” First Rate

You can develop investment strategies based on data and client intent to produce a custom portfolio of financial instruments to meet investor needs.  

The right type of performance reporting can focus your client meetings around insights and data, demonstrating that client wealth stewardship is front-and-center. As you develop your wealth management reporting capabilities, you’ll be able to offer more options and products to meet client needs and more effectively guide meetings.