The nature of relationships with clients has changed. Financial advisors, investment advisors, or other financial professionals have to work harder to offer the experience that clients expect.
So, what do clients want?
It’s true that the hard results matter. Clients want a wide range of financial products and diversified portfolios to maximize their chances of long-term success. But this is just the beginning.
Regardless of the type of advisor, clients want access to their advisor in minutes, with client engagement and client experiences being the key to strong relationships.
Achieving this is no easy feat. So, we’ve gone through our articles over the first half of the year to choose the top five nuggets of advice to win prospective clients and keep them.
1. Financial advisor marketing: How do you get leads?
Attracting new clients is particularly difficult in financial services as the cost-per-lead price is higher than in other industries. One report found that the cost per lead is $761 for paid generation initiatives, with $555 for organic ones. This leaves us with an average cost of $658 per lead – even if the lead doesn’t convert. That’s thousands of dollars potentially wasted without much return.
When combined with the substantial time commitment involved (which detracts from the time spent on current clients), acquisition costs can be a thorn in the side for most financial advisors or firms. Given this, it becomes important to find more cost-effective ways to both find and convert clients, with chatbots emerging as the next big thing in lead generation.
The rise of Generative AI means that financial advisors can spend less time and effort both finding and gauging the interest of potential clients, or even encouraging new conversions among current ones.

For example, when speaking with a client over a chat channel, the bot can suggest products that are more likely to resonate with their financial situation. Depending on how they respond, the sales team can then follow up with more tailored product or service offers, as the Spanish Renta 4 Banco did to increase conversions.

2. Secure, compliant, convenient messaging
In a wealth management context, your clients need to trust that any messages or information that they send to you is fully secure and compliant. But often these considerations only rise to the surface when something goes wrong. In everyday back-and-forth conversations, an overemphasis on security and compliance can come across as irritating, adding friction to the experience.
This is why so many financial advisors compromised on security for convenience, with banks fined a total of nearly two billion dollars in total as a result. While the advisors’ actions are understandable – not meeting client service expectations will risk losing their business – it is simply not appropriate to overlook client security in favor of convenience.
Instead, advisors and financial planners need to find a method of communication that embraces the trifecta of security, compliance, and convenience. In other words, they need a secure messaging solution that emulates popular messaging apps.

3. AI-powered human advisors
Did you know that 58% of relationship managers claim that a big challenge in their role involves managing client expectations of being available 24/7? When combined with the fact that the cost per relationship manager (according to 45% of executives) is rising, this leads to higher workloads and stress for financial advisors.
This means that wealth management firms need to find a way to manage client expectations while addressing process inefficiencies and also controlling spiraling costs.
The answer lies in Generative AI.
For a long time, AI chatbots have been thought of as customer service tools, able to take care of more simple queries but not adding any true value beyond this. Now, with the advent of Generative AI, new high-value applications are being uncovered.
One, as we mentioned earlier, is the role it can play in lead generation. But that’s not all. AI Co-Pilot technology is essentially the chatbot working on behalf of the financial advisor instead of being a client-facing tool.

As it can be connected to the organization’s own LLM, the generative capabilities when it comes offering very specific advice is highly impressive. This can drastically improve advisor efficiency as they no longer have to search manually for the correct response.

4. Proactive financial planning
One of the most reliable indicators of higher levels of client lifetime value is the frequency of quality interactions with their financial consultants. But generally speaking, clients will only reach out to their advisors on specific occasions. In fact, one report found that only 11% of clients will speak to their advisors on a weekly basis, rising to 32% monthly and 42% quarterly.
This means that most clients only get in contact with their clients when they have a problem or to get an overview of their current investments. Financial advisors can piggyback on these interactions to recommend new products or services, but relying solely on quarterly interactions is unlikely to be enough.
Instead, it’s important to be proactive and reach out to clients with interesting suggestions. It’s true that too many untailored attempts will be seen as intrusive but through a mixture of AI, labeling features, and outbound broadcasting capabilities, financial advisors can send specific, personalized recommendations to the right people and increase their chances of generating added value.

5. Ethic-based investment portfolio
The type of investments that clients are interested in varies, particularly among younger generations and wealthy clients. One Capgemini report found that 39% of HNWIs under 40 years of age ask for an ESG score before making an investment decision, with 43% of ultra-HNWI individuals saying the same thing.
Of course, the ability for the investment to perform is still the primary reason that many would choose one investment over another. Likewise the client’s risk tolerance needs to be taken into account. However, as a portfolio manager, being able to offer a broader range of ethical investment opportunities that also have strong potential returns is needed.
Providing options of these types can dramatically improve the relationship between the client and professional advisor, as the effort in personalizing the investment is appreciated by the client. For firms looking to increase their competitiveness, this is a solid area of differentiation.

A digital platform for dedicated advisors
Financial planning services aren’t just about assets under management or selling commission-based products. It’s also about offering sound investment advice, retirement planning, tax planning, or more in a timely, professional, and accessible manner.
For many financial advisors, this poses a challenge as they are faced with the task of offering financial advice to multiple parties while also sourcing new leads.
It doesn’t matter whether you are an independent advisor or an experienced advisor for a large firm, wealth managers of all types need to prioritize client interactions to offer an investment management service that meets expectations.
Unblu is a secure digital interaction platform that helps investment professionals to scale their AUM growth by improving the client-advisor relationship and minimizing advisors’ non-core activities.
Interested in finding out more?
