GUIDELINES
Please use the following areas of questions as a guide to help you structure your 700 statement.
1. Best Client Reporting Platform
Please explain how your client reporting platform provides clients with the right data about the outlook and performance of their investment strategy while saving time and money for the bank.
Also, please specify how your firm’s customer reporting platform helps private bankers interact with their clients regularly. Finally, please describe how it keeps both clients and private bankers accountable, allowing private bankers to meet client needs, optimise their campaigns and get optimal results.
2. Best CRM for Private Banking
Please outline how your CRM system helps bankers manage their client base, allowing the bank to centralise, optimise and streamline communication. Also, please explain how technology investments made in the past 12 months have enhanced the quality and consistency of private bankers’ relationship with their clients and improved customer loyalty.
3. Best Digital Innovator of the Year
Please describe one or more key tech/digital initiatives introduced over the past year - comprising new products and services and/or significant technological improvement to products and processes – and tangible benefits brought to your firm and clients.
Also, please explain how this new technology has supported digital transformation and streamlined operations.
What are the steps that lead you to launch new digital solutions? How important is it for your firm to build digital systems and innovative solutions leveraging feedback from clients and private bankers?
4. Best Digital Private Bank (NEW FOR 2024)
Please briefly describe which key technology investments your institution has made over the past 12 months that have improved your client services and enhanced the client experience. Also, please indicate how technology has affected private bankers’ productivity and efficiency and contributed to grow revenues and profits, while positioning your institution as a ‘digital first’ private bank.
5. Best Private Bank for Big Data Analytics and AI
Please provide evidence of key initiatives introduced over the past year related to Big Data analytics, which have enabled your firm to successfully predict customer behavior, particularly at times of high market volatility.
Please also describe key initiatives and services launched at your firm based on natural language models and generative AI which have empowered advisers and driven greater client engagement.
6. Best Private Bank for Client Acquisition
Please indicate how investments in the digital platform at your institution have helped private bankers acquire new clients (including key segments, such as millennials, entrepreneurs etc) and what challenges you had to face. What engaging digital tools and prospecting techniques have you used to attract new clients? Is social selling effective for larger, sophisticated clients? Has technology and working remotely enabled private bankers to tap into new and unexpected needs of new clients? How many clients did you acquire over the past 12 months compared to past years? Where did you source them from?
7. Best Private Bank for Culture and Vision
Please highlight how your institution has developed a strong and common culture conducive to the execution of its digital strategy, including support from top management, removing silos and breaking through risk aversion and experimentation. How do you foster a digital culture?
Please describe the key pillars of the digital transformation for your firm, progress made so far and the plan to achieve your digital vision.
Also, please provide evidence of how your existing technology and any technology investments made over the past year have helped enhance the bank’s value proposition, making it more appealing to today’s increasingly interconnected world. Finally, please indicate the biggest challenge you face in your drive towards digitalisation, when you attempt to update traditional ways of working. Do private bankers tend to resent innovation? How do you avoid resentment? Do you believe that the drive towards digitalisation and innovation must come from the top or should be decentralised? What was the single biggest change or initiative that has promoted a culture of innovation within the bank?
8. Best Private Bank for Cyber Security
Please describe best practices adopted and investments made at your firm that help manage risks posed by cyber-security threats facing your business, especially during the past few years of hybrid/remote working, and briefly outline your response plan for a cyber incident, and key benefits for your clients.
9. Best Private Bank for Digital Customer Experience
Please provide supporting evidence of how technology has enabled private bankers to keep close to clients, reassure them and provide timely market updates and advice. Please illustrate how new digital approaches have enabled your firm to reinvent engagement with clients and meet their evolving needs, also through partnerships with fintech firms.
Please demonstrate how this unique client experience has reflected in your private bank’s KPIs (in terms of new client relationship, increased client assets, revenues and so on).
Also, please indicate which digital skills and services clients have most appreciated over the past 12 months, and which skills and services are likely to differentiate your firm from competition. Finally, please indicate what types of clients (by age group, wealth, profession etc) tend to use digital services at your firm, and what it implies for your digitalisation process going forward.
10. Best Private Bank for Digital Marketing & Communication
Please describe how digital marketing, through digital/social media and platforms, has helped your firm grow its brand awareness, promote specific products and services to clients, in a bespoke way, and improve client prospecting. Please indicate key results achieved in terms of revenues growth, client retention and acquisition.
Please give details of three key initiatives launched over the past year, to improve client communication through digital channels (including mobile and tablet, web portals and social media). How have you leveraged technology to offer customised communication to existing clients and target new clients over the past 12 months?
How have you used technological tools to customise your client experience, from onboarding to the product choice and preferences for interaction?
Also, please indicate what share of your client communication is conducted through digital channels and how you expect it will evolve in the future.
11. Best Private Bank for Digital Portfolio Management
Please highlight how changes in the use of technology - or new technology investments made during the past year - have contributed to modernise portfolio management, asset allocation and product strategy, and have helped develop digital advisory services, including health checks for clients, improving performance, managing risk and meeting clients’ goals. Also, please explain how digital tools allow the personalisation of CIO insights in solutions that are more bespoke and relevant to clients.
12. Best Private Bank for Digital Wealth Planning
Please explain how your firm provides regulated, digital real time advice, and how technology has helped private bankers recommend a suitable investment strategy based on a client’s individual financial situation, relative to their attitude to risk and an understanding of their life stage, assets and goals.
13. Best Private Bank for Digitally Empowering Relationship Managers
Please highlight how you have digitally empowered relationship managers (RMs) and how improvements in this area have boosted RM’s productivity and services, allowing them to keep close contact with existing clients, attract new clients and onboard them digitally, while complying with regulation. Also, please highlight how investments made in digital tools to empower RMs have enabled your firm to attract new advisers or retain existing private bankers. Are there any ‘killer’ apps, or tools that have been particularly successful in empowering relationship managers, allowing them to provide more bespoke and relevant products and services to clients?
Also, please describe what sort of training has been provided to private bankers on new digital tools.
14. Best Private Bank for ESG Technology
With sustainability and impact investing now firmly at the core of all investment activities, please indicate how technology investments made at your firm have improved the integration of ESG factors into the investment process and the alignment of investments with client values.
Also, please highlight how technology developed/used at your institution has enhanced impact measurement and any other benefits of technology in the ESG/impact investing space.
15. Best Private Bank for Self-directed Investments
Please highlight how your firm is facing increasing demand from self-directed investors, and how technology has helped transform how investors engage with their investments in a modern, digital experience, whether directly only or also through an adviser. Also, please explain how important it is for your firm to consider not only traditional investments but also cryptos and other digital assets. Finally, please specify how big tech firms may provide inspiration for your digital services and how you face competition from non-financial services providers.
16. Best Private Bank for use of RegTech
Please give details of key investments in technology made over the past year to meet regulatory requirements (RegTech), improve client engagement/experience, increase advisers’ productivity and enhance operational efficiency.
17. Best Private Bank for use of Technology
Please provide client AuM in local currency (for the private banking business only, excluding assets under advisory).
Please give details of key investments in technology made in 2023 to improve client engagement/experience, increase advisers’ productivity and enhance operational efficiency, helping you face social restrictions. Also, please describe your firm’s digital transformation, how you have faced new challenges and which key areas you aim at improving.
Please outline how technology has enabled you to measure employees’ productivity and targets, and enhance client services, and how you were able to shift your corporate culture and management style quickly and effectively to embrace digitalisation.
Please also indicate any key investments made to meet regulatory requirements (RegTech) and face cybersecurity threats, and details of key partnerships with fintech firms or other third-party firms, and how this ecosystem has become a key competitive advantage for your firm, accelerating the innovation process. Also please indicate how technology and digitalisation have contributed to grow revenues and profits, boost inflows, attract new clients and grow client assets.
Finally, please provide evidence of how your technology budget is split among the following areas (client facing technology, relationship manager technology, back-office technology, regulatory compliance and risk management, data management and analytics, IT infrastructure) and high priorities for the future.
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