“A  business’s mission statement must be communicated in a way that touches someone personally, as opposed to firing words as darts and hoping that some eventually stick or hit the bullseye.” – Brian Solis, The End of Business As Usual 

“Advisers need a 25-word customer proposition that can be delivered on the golf course, or in a wine bar, that gets a client to bite very quickly.” – Clive Waller, MD, CWC Research

It’s not all that often that a booklet on client suitability – this was one part of Aberdeen’s Adviser Intelligence Series and came free with Financial Advisor on the 10^th May – chimes perfectly with one of the latest books on social media and the digital revolution, but that’s exactly what happened this week.

In his article, Preparing for the RDR, Clive Waller looked at some of the most important aspects of RDR-readiness, such as the development of a client proposition, independence, fee charging and regulation.

He posed the question, “are advisers going to be chartered accountants or turf accountants in the future?”

To answer, financial advisers need to be clear about the value they’re adding and be able to communicate that succinctly, ideally in 140 characters or less, to all of their existing or prospective clients.

First, however, you need to make sure you really understand what your clients value.

Malcolm Kerr from Ernst & Young thinks “client research has been a neglected area of RDR preparation. Engaging clients in the process early on can reap rewards further down the line.”

So don’t forget to ask your customers what they want?  You might even be surprised by the answers.

But what then? Once you’ve researched your market, defined your business and come up with a plan… how do you wrap it all up in a mission statement that get’s clients interested rather than simply scoring you points on the ‘slightly cheesy marketing’ leaderboard.

Brian Solis offers up the following challenge, “when was the last time you read your company’s mission statement?  You probably haven’t in a long time.  If you have reviewed it recently, would you tweet it?”

Therein lays the difference between mission statements now – mid digital revolution – and then, when marketing strategy was often consigned to a hefty file hidden on a shelf somewhere.

Then, you could get away with dismissing things as ‘marketing speak’ and question how much they really helped the bottom line. Now, customers expect – no, demand – that you can articulate who you are and what you are about in simple, engaging language.

Just last night I was instant messaging on Skype with a new contact in the US.  He’d sent me a link to a promotion his brand was running.  I was interested but needed to check it out and knew I’d have to run it past the rest of the team.  Keen to save myself time, I asked him to write back with his ‘3 line summary’ of what I should tell my Chief Technology Officer (CTO) about the product.

I was willing to recommend him, but I wanted him to do the work to define his product.

These days, loyal and satisfied clients are willing to do much of the legwork of recommending your products and services but to be effective; you need to give them the right tools.

A few years back a catchy strap-line writ large was the main method of brand promotion. Clients didn’t want – or need – the detail.  Now, traditional media is in decline.  Customers are engaging with each other and recommending things via online word of mouth.

Your customers can help you, but you need to help them understand you first.  It’s about closing the gap between a brand and its customers and sharing the power between adviser and client.

So, what should you be aiming for in a mission statement?  There’s a lot more detail on this in End of Business As Usual, but put simply:

• What is the call to action?
• What is your true purpose and mission?
• What benefits do you offer that real people want?
• Does you mission fit in a tweet (140 characters or less)?

On the 10^th May, LinkedIn held its first ever Financial Services Summit.  The event took place in New York, featured key people from such financial stalwarts as American Express, Citi, Fidelity Investments and Prudential Retirement and set out to examine the role that social media is playing within the financial services industry.

An interesting review of the Financial Services Summit by Econsultancy got straight to the point, however, by noting that “it was curious to see a panel on social media where only two out of six individuals on the panel have Twitter accounts.  One was Clara Shih, who runs the agency Hearsay Social, and the other, Frank Eliason, SVP of Social for Citi.”

So, does it matter that industry experts, gathered together to discuss social media aren’t actually all that immersed in social media themselves?

On the one hand, as Econsultancy points out, Twitter is merely a “communication channel for 140 million active users… and financial advisers are mainly reaching out to prospective clients on LinkedIn with Twitter only used by 8% of them.”

What’s more, all of us, of course, have natural preferences.  I might prefer Twitter to Facebook, you might spend hours networking on LinkedIn.  Different tastes help rather than hinder the social media melting point. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

It does, however, reveal the gulf that exists between the people who run financial services and the people on the ground who are their clients, and their future clients.  Last time I wrote about the need for real-time intelligence and unified automation.

Put simply, financial providers need to get better at knowing what’s going on and much better at reacting to it in a joined up way and this is a problem that goes much wider than simply platform preferences, it’s a radical cultural shift that has got to happen sooner rather than later.

As Econsultancy points out, “Though the panellists did mention communication on all platforms, a lot of the issues they are facing aren’t about where the conversations are taking place.  It’s rather that financial institutions need to put customers at the centre of their decisions as well as enable their employees to do the same.”

The panellists agreed that financial services has much to gain from social media:

• The growing habit of freely sharing personal data has the potential to be of huge value to the financial world – Clara Shih, CEO, Hearsay Social
• Social media provides far greater opportunity for deeper customer engagement – Audrey Hendley, General Manager, New Customer Acquisition, Amercian Express
• Companies can be where the customers are – Sean Belkam, SVP Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, Fidelity Investments

But it was Frank Eliason from Citi who seemed to really ‘get it’:

“For Citi, social media shifted the control.  Now the control is more in the hands of the customer and the hands of your employee.  This is changing the culture at all companies and we’re forced to be more open. This openness will help build the trust that is lacking in the financial world at the moment.”

Openness and trust.  These are the things at the core of the digital revolution and its impact on the financial world.  These are the things that mean, even if by day you talk only to institutional investors via traditional channels, social media, digital and mobile still matter.  They matter because your employees now have a voice, they matter because your ex clients now have a voice and they matter because, increasingly, your competitors have a voice.

Social media isn’t a sprint to see who can go live on the most platforms quickest.  It’s a marathon to see who will succeed at putting clients where they belong – at the heart of business.

After all, as Brian Solis says, if you want people to talk about you….give them something to say.

And finally, here are the stats to show why LinkedIn is well placed to lead thought leadership when it comes to social advice:

Come back soon to read part 2 of our Future of Financial Marketing series where we’ll be taking more gems from The End of Business by Brian Solis and applying them to the financial sector.

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We have increased investment at the school: We used the proceeds from our fund-raising activities towards a computer based teaching package and have developed new lessons and teaching resources for our volunteers.

We have recruited new Kurtosys India volunteers; in the pictures you can see Shruti and Lohit teaching their first lesson. It’s also a new school year so the children are new too. This is a clear and simple demonstration of the great work that the school do as children only attend for a year to get them into a position where they can apply for and be integrated into mainstream school.

And let’s not forget the fun! Focusing on English, the new lessons are activity based with lots of songs and games to encourage listening and speaking. Although lessons are structured, teaching is informal, creating a relaxed atmosphere for teaching and learning. The children have access to the English language skills of Kurtosys staff, which is our small but important gift to them.

P.S. We’ve posted some more photos on our Facebook page.

This is the part one of our new series The Future of Financial Marketing.  We’ll be sharing some of the best bits from End Of Business by @briansolis and applying them to the financial sector.  We’ll share some thoughts about how social marketing is changing the game and hopefully spark some ideas on how the financial sector can respond.  Most of all we hope you’ll join us for an interesting education and if you haven’t done already, please do subscribe to receive regular updates.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a world that’s radically different from the one we live in right now.  The pace of change in the financial sector has historically been reasonably slow so it’s easy to dismiss disruptive technology and social media as passing fads rather than the game changers they actually are.

But if our post on Digital Darwinism wasn’t enough to convince you that radical change is happening right now, how about this excerpt from the New York Times:

“Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.”

According to Brian Solis customers fall into three categories:

• Traditional
• Online
• Social / Connected

It’s clear which group Allison is destined to join once she becomes a fully fledged consumer.  She, like the majority of her generation, are connected at a level that some traditionalists would find shocking.

A recent blog by Solis Generation C: The Connected Customer, has all the stats you need to educate yourself about connected consumers but why should you care?

In a nutshell, three reasons:

• Connected customers will quickly dominate the workforce – and buying force.  Failing to adapt to their needs is preparing to fail.
• Already, connected consumers have seized control of brands.  Brands are no longer created, they’re co-created.
• Unless we truly take the time to understand what social customers mean to the way we sell and provide products and services we risk wasting huge chunks of our marketing budgets and watching customers flood out of the door.

A report published this week by PulsePoint in conjunction with The CMO Club and Digiday focuses on the “Digital Divide” that increasingly separates the way we marketers use social channels and the way that consumers wish that we would.

The study set out to find out how people are really using digital channels.

“With digital, consumers are moving fluidly between channels and devices but most marketers still have basic priorities in this space.  They are measuring performance and optimising in silos without consistent messaging across customer touch points. This is because most marketers are still looking at the separation of channels at the core of what they are doing instead of adopting a customer-centric approach.”

Having served time as a financial marketer I feel justified saying that if ever there was an industry that operates in silos and measures things obsessively, often to the detriment of results… it is financial services.

The entire sector is slow to react and slow to change.  Yes, there are some good reasons why. Compliance and regulation are the most important.  But, increasingly, regulation or no regulation, customers will demand a more agile approach to communication and engagement.  Financial services providers MUST find a way to achieve this.  Yes, it will be a challenge… but that’s all the more reason to get started right away.

The Digital Divide report recommends real-time interactive marketing, a goal which relies on mastering both:

• Real-time intelligence, and
• Unified automation

So preparing for the connected customer doesn’t just mean educating yourself about what they think, how they act and what motivates them.  Targeting connected customers requires connected organisations.

Econsultancy sums it up neatly, “while our priorities are still channel driven and campaign and campaign driven, the unifying principle will never be the consumer, which it must be.”

Finding a way to capture – and use – real time intelligence is likely to require a whole overhaul of CRM and data systems for many financial providers.  Responding to it will take more budget and more hard work, but ignoring it is a sure-fire route to professional suicide.

As Brian Solis notes,

“As connected consumers climb the ranks of social hierarchy, they do so by earning prominence with every new connection they make.  Suddenly, the connections people have made become a powerful force of nature that holds the potential to transform markets and define (or redefine) the stature of brands.”

In the financial sector, you might just as easily write industry instead of brand.  There is already sufficient backlash against banks and financial institutions to give consumers a reason to strive for transformation.

Pushing products, demanding attention or ignoring change won’t work anymore.  It’s time for everyone to get connected and before you can start engaging with clients you’ve got to connect amongst yourselves, connect your business.

Only a client focused, connected and seamless organisation will have the power to be heard by a generation that’s been “wired for distraction”. Everything else will simply be noise.

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Our recent post on Digital Darwinism – which was inspired by the Brian Solis book The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution – seemed to capture some attention so, if you helped share the post or tweeted a link… thank you.  And if you’re new to the Kurtosys blog, welcome.  We hope you’ll stay around.

Choosing blog topics can be a difficult beast at times.  Do you blog about your brand and all of its fantastic products and services…. Or, do you blog about issues, digital innovation and the latest thought leadership in social media?

At Kurtosys, we’re very much focused on helping asset managers to grow and retain asset.  We want to lead the field in client reporting and use beautiful software to change the game in financial data.  In short, we love talking about ourselves.  Everybody does.

But we also realise that sometimes it’s best to step back a little. We want to inform our clients – and you – about how we think digital tools are changing financial services.  Our day job might well be client reporting, data management or mobile apps, but to excel at these we need to understand the broader digital landscape.

Institutional investors might not be using Facebook to choose which funds to invest in, but there’s a strong chance they will be using it to share photos or keep track of friends; similarly, they might not yet be tweeting professionally but they will be influenced by all sorts of tweets from in and outside the industry.  The habits they develop in their personal world will quickly change and shape their expectations in the business world.

That’s why all of us need to actively educate ourselves when it comes to connected customers, social commerce and online interaction.  It’s no longer good enough to respond quickly to change, you need to predict what’s coming next and prepare.

We take education seriously when it comes to social media, which is why we continue to seek out inspirational books like The End of Business.  The fact that so many of you were interested in what we’d learnt shows that you’d like to join us on our discovery quest too so, over the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing more of our favourite learning points from Brian Solis.

We’ll touch on social commerce, being wired for distraction, building adaptive organisations and predicting the future and, all the while, we’ll try and take the gems from Solis and apply them to financial services and wealth management.

We hope you’ll join us for the ride.

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After about 10 years in existence, the concept of a Secure Portal in the asset management industry is reaching it’s first cycle. Many firms are now considering the next generation portals and their portal strategy; here at Kurtosys we are at the forefront of this change: We plan to ensure that our clients not only save a great deal of  time and money, but also achieve the higher goals of providing client stickiness, brand affiliation and a culture of transparency through a beautiful digital experience.

 
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“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin

46% of people think that Facebook will disappear within the next 5 years.  Sound surprising?  Well, at the time of writing those were the latest results from a survey currently running on the Forbes website asking readers to vote for whether they think Google, Facebook or both will have disappeared by 2017.  You can go along now and vote yourself although you might be too busy wondering why on earth people have started talking about Facebook’s demise even before it goes public in a couple of weeks.

Actually, it’s all too easy to get caught up in details like this – in guessing whether Google or Facebook will win the network war or Android or iOS will rule mobile – rather than concentrating on what’s really important, which is spotting the underlying shifts in consumer behaviour that are really changing the game.

A few weeks back I wrote a post called “I never liked you anyway”.  It responded to suggestions that there is no place for social media or digital tools within financial services.  I used that post to explain why I think that financial services differ from retail, why they demand their own special approach.  To some extent, however, these issues are just small pieces in a much larger jigsaw.

The world – and that includes financial services providers – will be forced to respond to the digital revolution because it is just that, a revolution.  The changes that are sweeping client behaviour are fundamental changes in the way the world works, not small responses to the growth of a social network here, the loss of search engine there.

Some people use the speed of change as a reason to stand still.  They cite the fact that MySpace has already all but disappeared as reason to ignore Facebook, or tablets or virtual financial advice.

Infact, experience shows that it rarely makes sense to stand still.  The key to the future doesn’t lie in choosing which network to piggy back onto.  No, the real skill lies in noticing and reacting to the broader shifts in client relationships – the changes which will never be undone but will only continue to evolve.

In his excellent book, The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution, Brian Solis uses mobile phones to illustrate this issue.  When it comes to phones it isn’t the fact that landlines are disappearing that’s important, it’s the bigger impact that mobiles have had on society at large:

“Displacing landlines is one thing.  The cell phone’s impact on behaviour is something different altogether.  For years, we frowned on bringing anything to the dinner table that might detract from the interactions that meals foster.  But then cell phones quietly took over our attention one by one, until the table was surrounded by people with their heads focused downward and their thumbs texting away.  To an outsider, this conduct would appear nothing less than rude.”

A similarly seismic shift has occurred in the relationships between clients and their wealth managers.

It’s not so much that fact that conversations now occur via Twitter, Facebook or Skype that’s important, it’s what these changes represent – which is a fundamental shift in the power dynamics between client and advisers and an equally huge change in the way we all consume and share information.

Together, these shifts have put clients very much in the driving seat:

“Who’s in control of the information that circulates within each network?  It’s not the brand or its clever messaging, attractive promotions, or creative gimmicks. People are in control.  The choices they make and the experience they share through their words, relationships, and actions, influence those around them.”

People are connecting with each other to form vast networks of information.  It’s not just the fact that we’re all connected by just six degrees of separation; it’s the fact that we’re motivated to educate and inform each other… and trust each other’s opinions.

Facebook and Google might very well be gone within 5 years, but their legacy will be very much alive.  Yes, we might have a wholly new way of sharing information, but that drive to be connected, to engage is unlikely to disappear and that’s why, regardless of how long you think social networks will survive, you’ve got to get used to change happening fast, happening more often and happening now.

In the words of Solis:

“Once “too big to fail” businesses such as Borders, Tower Records and Blockbuster are now gone.  Each business is a victim of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behaviour when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to exploit it.  Digital Darwinism does not discriminate.  Every business is threatened.”

Escaping the threat means embracing change and developing a culture that lets you change and adapt again and again and again.  At the end of the day, it comes back to that Forbes article on Google and Facebook which ends with the challenge “Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it.  It’s all up for grabs.”

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Wealth management has struggled to recover from the credit crunch and all that accompanied it in terms of reputational damage and lost investor confidence. Now, as the sector is emerging from the crisis what key issues will transform wealth management? Take a look at our 5 transformational ‘T’s’ for wealth management to find out:

Technology
Technology has become more than simply a back office operation. Whilst a strong focus on technology remains essential to ensuring day to day efficiency and cost control, choosing the right technological tools has evolved into what is now very much a front office, marketing and customer service issue.

Clients expect to be able to pick and choose which online tools they use and they expect all of the information they want to be available via their chosen device, wherever they may be.

Technology is no longer simply about cutting expenditure, it’s become a hygiene factor for good customer service and a way to engage and retain clients to help build a business that’s profitable and sustainable over the longer term.

Transparency
Whether it’s the transparency and simplicity of investment products themselves, clear and concise client reporting or the more fundamental transparency and assurance reports demanded by institutional investors, transparency has become an essential feature of asset management.
Inevitably, however, transparency comes with certain strings attached when it comes to client reporting. Giving investors the information they need can become cumbersome and time consuming… unless you invest upfront in the right tools for the job.

Trust
Of course, at the end of the day transparency is key because of its role in building trust. In an industry that is still struggling to conquer the demons of the credit crunch and the financial upheaval that followed in its wake, trust has never been more important.
Superior client reporting and state of the art online analysis and interactive tools are one way of showing the world that you’re open and honest; A way to rebuild the trust that’s essential to all client relationships.

Types not ££££
It is no longer acceptable to see £ signs instead of customer types. Whereas in the past, segmentation efforts barely extended beyond classifying customers by the level of assets under management, today’s clients demand to be managed personally. They expect customised treatment that differs according to their investment objectives, personal values and the big social issues that concern them most.

As customers the world over reject the sales-led, mass advertising approaches of past years, demonstrating – no, proving – that a client-led strategy is at the heart of a business will become the key to acquiring and retaining customers and asset. Differentiation will increasingly come to mean a differentiated service as well as a stand-out product offering and focusing on servicing client needs will continue to grow in importance.

Tweaking
So what’s left for our final ‘transformational T’ – well, tweaking. One size never did fit all, but now clients don’t just expect an appreciation of their unique needs and characteristics, they expect things to actually change as a result. Clients want to be treated in a highly personalised way. They want to be able to choose what they read in their client reports, they want to choose which factors to investigate using market analysis tools. In short, they want to be in control.

To give clients the control they crave, and to grow and retain asset, each and every wealth manager will need to get the balance right when it comes to technology, trust, transparency, types and tweaking…. anything less is unlikely to be good enough.

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My last post shared some results from American Century’s report on Financial Social Media.  In amongst the encouraging stats showing the growth of social media and digital tools was the worrying news that 40% of participants didn’t have a clear social media usage policy in place; so, to help out here’s a brief guide on setting some social ground rules.

Define “social media”.  That sounds like an essay question, but actually being really clear about what you mean by social media and what your usage policy refers to and is intended to achieve is vital.

Be specific.  When you talk about “social media” do you mean Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or all three?  A social media usage policy is designed to avoid confusion so make it as clear and straightforward as possible and state exactly which networks or channels you are referring to each time.

Strategy comes first.  It’s vital to remain compliant within the financial sector but adherence to regulations shouldn’t come at the cost of business strategy.  Even before you start drafting a usage policy there is some thinking to be done.  What are you trying to achieve from social media? Who is going to be involved?  What are your specific goals and objectives? How will you measure them?  We quoted the author of The Co-creation Roadmap over on our sister blog Sponge recently who observed that “without a strategy, tweeting is just typing” and his words are just as relevant here.

Have some consequences.  Social media can easily blur the lines between business and pleasure but don’t forget that there are real business issues at stake if employees cross the line and act inappropriately.  Set out some disciplinary procedures that show what happens if policy rules aren’t followed.  And act on them.

Stay current.  Social media is evolving almost as I type.  Keep the policy up to date and relevant and make sure you share a copy with every new employee.

Define roles and responsibilities.  Who are you expecting to take the lead in social?  Who do you want to take part?  Will it be optional or a part of the ‘day job’. Clear objectives are essential to getting everyone on the same page.

Get it checked.  Finally, get a usage policy you draft checked over by the appropriate compliance and legal teams.  Facebook may sound like fun but getting caught out for an ill-thought through status update most certainly isn’t.

Want to know more:

• Check out this five part blog series from CompliSpace “designed to help employers understand and then manage their Social Media Risks”.
• Head over to Slideshare to find FINRA’s 10 Commandments of Social Media Engagement for Financial Firms, a great overview from Glen Gilmore, Adjunct Professor of Digital Marketing & Social Media Law.

Often it’s the questions that probe a little deeper that are most useful. We know, intuitively, that the use of social media is rising – but not yet universal – amongst financial professionals but the debate gets more complex when it comes to what content social media channels should be used to provide.

According to the results of this survey, social media friendly advisers mainly turned to social channels to keep abreast of and share industry news.

What content do financial professionals want from asset managers?

The top three most popular types of content were commentary / market insight, educational content to share with clients and market news.

By now, the message should be getting through loud and clear that advisers are looking for value adding content that they can use with clients to help cement relationships.  Product information came lower down the list, and so, perhaps more surprisingly, did fund manager appearances.

Despite the rising popularity of video, webinars or fund manager appearances trailed behind more conventional ways of sharing information socially.

Perhaps the key to understanding this trend is the fact that we are talking about advisers here.  Advisers love content that can help them satisfy clients, offer added value services and generally ‘service’ a relationship. Whilst basic commentary can be interpreted, or shared in a way that can reflect glory on the both the adviser and the asset manager, videos are harder to share collaboratively.  If an adviser forwards a link to a client for a video or webinar they really are just forwarding a link, whereas, it’s easier to put an individual stamp on written information.

Most important social media offering an asset manager can provide?

Having determined what type of content is valued, the next question inevitably involves the specific social media channel to use.  Everyone knows the time that can be spent setting up and maintaining a presence over multiple social networks so which are the big hitters? Which ones are likely to give you the best return for your effort?

The clear winner was LinkedIn.  Whilst Facebook dominates recreational social networking, LinkedIn is fast establishing itself as the only destination for business based communication and seems particularly well suited to the financial sector.

Next on the list came ‘adviser communities’ showing that advisers really value that tailor made, specialist effort that goes into setting up and managing online communities.  Providing a safe space online for thought leadership, the sharing of best practice or simply providing a way to get quick answers to the day’s burning questions seems to have a strong appeal… making the case for all asset managers to add some sort of online community function to their offering.

Do you have a formal social media policy in place?

And finally, what about policy and regulation?  After all, that’s what things often come down to in the financial space. Whilst those unconvinced by the potential of social media continue to cite compliance concerns as the no. 1 barrier, there is still a jaw dropping 40% of people who claim to have no formal social media policy in place.

Given that social media is everywhere…that the lack of a policy most certainly will not restrict people’s appetite to ‘get stuck in’ it’s surely these people who are sticking their head in the sand that have the most to fear from compliance.

We’ll be focusing in on social media policies and sharing some tips for how to develop your own in future post so, if you haven’t already subscribed to the Kurtosys blog make sure that you sign up to avoid missing out.