Creating Value: Understanding Customers is the Key for Wealth Managers

I'm Ashish Khanna. I'm a partner at L.E.K. based in London. I lead our financial services practice in Europe. L.E.K. has been at the forefront of advising management teams and investors on creating value in the UK wealth management landscape over the past decade. First and foremost our fundamental principle is that our customers, our clients should understand their own customers better. It starts at its heart with understanding who the segments of customers they're trying to target are. That really drives the propositional choices that might underpin the business models that our clients need to develop. That may be a direct to consumer proposition with low or no advice, it may be a hybrid proposition, or it may be a full fact advisory proposition which includes, not just financial planning, but also wealth management and investment management and tax and advisory services. It's not a one size fits all. And it's important that customers recognize that it is not as such a one size fits all.

That then drives a set of operational choices which businesses must make. The one size fits all paradigm, which existed over the last century is no longer relevant in an environment where the forces of technology and disruption from an external landscape are creating noise and disturbance around the future proof nature of some of these legacy business models. Understanding who your clients are, and then creating the propositional dimensions which are relevant to them, and then building an organization that's relevant to delivering that proposition as opposed to force fitting a legacy business model onto a new paradigm is really where the game's changed to. And this is new, technology has come into the wealth management sector with a force that other sectors have seen for the last 15 years. But the wealth management sector has been a lagger until very recently. And we are at that forefront, helping our clients understand and discover the power of technology, the power of data, the power of value creation opportunities that underpin that story for their end clients, for their investors and ultimately for their management teams as well to improve the sophistication of their day jobs.