Wealth and asset managers are undergoing a significant change in the way technology and data underpin their firms. Strategic business leaders who understand the importance of embedding the right technology in their organization will deliver far-reaching benefits across every inch of their operating model – and accelerate toward achieving the firm’s overriding business objectives.

Wealth and asset management firms are already driving tangible returns on their technology investments. Digitized operating models are helping them achieve cost reductions, efficiency improvements, increased assets under management (AUM) revenue growth, and profit margins. All this, while gaining a competitive edge to increase market share. But what about those intangible benefits, such as happier employees and customers?

This blog addresses:

• What’s holding back your technology investment returns.
• Measuring technology investment returns.
• What you can do to maximize technology investment and achieve a positive return.
• The power of one platform.
• Strategic one platform returns.

What’s Holding Back Your Technology Investment ROI?

There are multiple factors impacting wealth and asset managers’ ability to achieve their desired return on investment (ROI) when it comes to technology. These include:

Data

The ever-expanding and complex data universe is impacting firms’ ability to consolidate, standardize and analyze data to make informed decisions. As firms are required to utilize more data sets in different formats to gain deep and meaningful insights, legacy technology and infrastructures won’t be able to scale to cope with increasing volumes, varieties and data sources. High-value internal data science and technology teams are under pressure to manually undertake vast amounts of data cleansing, integrating and normalizing. This subsequently diminishes technology returns.

Siloes

Specialist teams operating in siloes are busy building their own processes using their own technology and can even develop their own internal culture. Firms operating under this approach typically end up using multiple platforms with similar capabilities, leaving the firm with a growing portfolio of expensive and disparate systems. Employees waste time entering the same information into several systems. The inefficiency of firms’ end-to-end workflows, the excessive cost of numerous platforms and maintaining several third-party vendor relationships can all negatively impact your technology ROI.

Legacy technology

Firms using antiquated technology risk limiting their ability to adapt to new market challenges and demands such as offering new asset classes or enhancing digital customer experiences. Legacy technology can prevent firms from responding quickly to regulatory impacts, forcing them to adjust internal processes, outsource to another technology partner or build new capabilities in-house. All of these are slow and costly resolutions, putting firms’ competitive edge and profitability at risk.

Calculating ROI for Technology Investments

Technology and data are the foundation of wealth and asset management firms, serving every function, every team and every individual to achieve optimum daily performance. Your ROI is calculated by dividing the net present return by the project cost, including maintenance costs, project management and any other associated cost of the investment.

In other words, your ROI is the ratio of ROI net profits over the total cost of the investment. To appropriately measure the ROI for your tech stack, key metrics can include:

• Efficiency gains, such as hours back to the business and full-time equivalent (FTE) saved.
• Greater process value across multiple teams.
• Faster time to market, higher productivity and improved visibility.
• Accelerated AUM growth and increased profit.
• Enhanced customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).

Any technology investment requires creating a business case. It’s a critical step to gaining buy-in from key stakeholders around the business, and calculating the ROI is a necessary part of that to ensure you won’t end up with a negative ROI.

What can I do to maximize ROI on technology investments?

Wealth and asset managers should develop a clear connection between technology investments and business goals. This demonstrates that your information technology (IT) team is a strategic partner in delivering the firm’s mission-critical priorities in an uncertain environment. In response, firms must review and unify their technology to evolve their operating model in unison.

This is why so many firms have turned to automating work wherever they can. Connecting the entire operating and technology model with automation gets work done faster without tying up existing staff or employing more people to help maximize technology investment returns.  

The Power of One Platform

With SS&C Blue Prism, we help you completely transform work at every level across your entire business – from reducing costs and improving productivity to delighting customers and accelerating AUM growth. Reap your technology investment returns today. 

We bring together everything you need to reimagine work and deliver transformational results for your customers with intelligence, orchestration and automation, surrounded by a best-practice operating model and comprehensive partner ecosystem. 

Our unified AI-powered platform provides total visibility into your business; it connects your people, processes and technologies and helps you power and manage work end-to-end across your entire organization, all while continuously improving results.  

Wealth and Asset Management Firms Can Achieve 5x More Business Value

SS&C Blue Prism enables wealth and asset management firms to rethink work and unlock transformational results by overcoming the challenges data, siloes and legacy technology present. We do this by:

• Unifying your people and digital workers into one collaborative workforce.
• Connecting your work at all levels: tasks, processes and end-to-end journeys.
• Enabling you to rapidly adapt to changing needs, grow as required and achieve the results your business demands.

You can unleash the true power of intelligent automation (IA) when:

• It works in collaboration with new and existing technology. It should be empowering for you and your people instead of just operating behind the scenes.
• It’s part of, and across, an end-to-end journey, connecting and enabling work across every resource, interaction, activity and touchpoint instead of just focusing on a stand-alone task.
• It’s operating across your organization, powering much bigger, more strategic results such as boosting your CX, driving higher customer lifetime value and delivering greater profitability instead of just delivering cost and efficiency improvements.

Process intelligence gives you deep insights into your operations, so you know exactly what works and what needs streamlining, where to make improvements and what business processes to automate next – all while saving design and build time and cost. Process orchestration ensures you’re prioritizing crucial tasks and streamlining handoffs between people and technology to avoid delays. Process automation not only automates work your employees shouldn’t have to do but empowers them to focus on what’s truly important. Process development ensures you move at market pace and your customers’ demand, helping you respond rapidly, scale with agility and put the power into the hands of the people closest to your customers.

By bringing together process orchestration, automation and development, and infusing artificial intelligence (AI) throughout, intelligent automation (IA) from SS&C Blue Prism helps you unify your entire workforce – people and digital – connecting work end-to-end and delivering exceptional performance enterprise-wide.

Data management

A data management platform underpins a unified platform as an invaluable tool to help collect, interpret, organize and action data from different data sources. Business analysts can identify patterns and trends to support more informed decision-making with the latest AI algorithms, allowing clients to unearth new insights. For wealth and asset management firms, this translates to better insights to make more strategic business decisions, and also to make better decisions for their client’s investments.

SS&C Everywhere enables you to:

• Overcome data accumulation challenges with access to deep datasets.
• Break down silos with unified data sets.
• Get ahead of the disparate data with real-time reporting.
• Put your data to work with fast, consistent and accurate insights.

As data reigns supreme, wealth and asset management firms that utilize their data strategically are seeing a transformative shift in their decision-making process and the ability to quickly adapt to these changing market and customer circumstances.

Strategic One Platform Returns

By leveraging IA and a single data platform, you can achieve significant results to get the right ROI for your technology stack. These fall under several categories.

Operational improvements such as efficiency, productivity and cost resulting from streamlined processes and better, more effective resource utilization across the business, including:

• $10 million reduction in processing costs per year.
• 50% reduction in workforce time wastage.
• 93% faster processing time.

Increased growth and competitive advantage by freeing up time to focus on higher-value work and outcomes, including:

• 6x higher customer onboarding than competitors.
• 300% improvement in customer support productivity.
• Revenue growth.
• $15 million value delivered per year due to a sharpened focus on higher-value work.
• Overcoming the labor and skills shortage.

Enhanced experiences for both customers and employees alike resulting from more meaningful, higher-value work and better customer service and attention. This includes:

• 50% improvement in staff satisfaction.
• 90% of staff benefit from a new way of working.
• $3.8 million revenue contribution by reduced customer attrition.

Real-Life Case Studies

Our wealth and asset management clients have achieved exceptional returns from adopting a full one-platform approach or leveraging sub-components of SS&C Blue Prism’s suite of IA solutions. 

Invesco Doubles ROI

To stay ahead of new and nimble market entrants and modern demands, Invesco aimed to enhance operational efficiency, mitigate risk, increase compliance and achieve cost savings. The company had already deployed an SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce in its back-office processes, so it looked to expand into the front office. These customer-facing roles require great dedication and thoughtful investment thesis from portfolio managers and analysts to alleviate any stress that comes with investing a lifetime of savings.

SS&C Blue Prism digital workers are now working behind the scenes to complete end-to-end tasks in Invesco’s back and front offices. In fact, the digital workforce is actively operating 165 processes in 35 business functions and sub-functions worldwide. Its transformation has helped them achieve:

• 2x increase in annual ROI.
• $2.1 million in annual savings.
• 3 million minutes back to the business.

A team of digital workers generates reports, allowing analysts to focus on more value-added work for clients. Invesco has scaled its automation program to include RPA, desktop automation, SS&C | Blue Prism® Automation Lifecycle Management (ALM) deployment, workflow, optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning (ML) and data visualization.

Old Mutual’s Digital Transformation

As a very large, complex business, Old Mutual realized it needed a major culture shift for employees and dated systems and processes that had not been upgraded for many years. Services needed to be streamlined and modernized, so customers could access Old Mutual in a way most convenient to them without impacting customers or employees.

The strategic partnership between Old Mutual and SS&C Blue Prism enables the team of digital employees to respond to customers’ needs quickly. It has helped bridge legacy environments with newer platforms to deliver consistent customer satisfaction. The technology has also allowed for rapid development and deployment, which enables the company to respond quickly to customers’ changing needs or external market forces, enabling:

• Improved customer-led experience.
• 22 million minutes saved and returned to employees.
• Data-driven internal process improvements.

Now, in partnership with SS&C Blue Prism, Old Mutual has over 200 digital workers in production, removing many time-consuming and repetitive tasks for employees. Digital workers have freed up 22 million minutes for employees, allowing them to return to their “roots” and increase focus on Old Mutual’s customers.

If you’re interested in accelerating your ROI with one platform and finding out more, get in touch today.