Company overview
A longstanding global asset management firm headquartered in the U.S. services the investment needs of individuals, advisors and institutions around the world. Advisors provide a broad range of financial services and products, and the organization is committed to empowering advisors by providing them access to the latest financial insights to work more efficiently.
Opportunity
Generally, advisors have been experiencing information overload with access to numerous tools and websites. Many were struggling with time split between learning how to use a plethora of tools to service their clients and sifting through content to track down market intel relevant for their book of business, and then studying/understanding this information relevant to market—while also servicing clients.
While well known in the industry, only 60% of US advisors were selling these funds, representing $20B in annual sales. The company wanted to understand how digital tools could add value for financial advisors, ideally helping advisors to understand and recommend more products to their clients from the company's product suite. The organization set out to improve its advisor/client experience, strengthen overall brand recognition, and increase awareness of the fund—while not losing sight of its trusted brand.
Approach
To kick things off, the company performed user research to understand the advisor's needs/pain points to inform a prototype. Initial findings showed that advisors were struggling to grow their knowledge base, which was at odds with their goals to grow the book of business. Advisors also had unique preferences for source material and lacked focus for where to go to find useful information. The prototype featured an action playlist to give advisors a single source to access curated content based on personal preferences to better guide advisor conversations with clients.
Using this research, the Devbridge team workshopped with the stakeholders to refine, develop, and, ultimately, build the solution.
Solution
Devbridge built a custom website and app for content management and a custom personalization engine to curate content for each user based on their preferences. Original content was delivered in the form of practice development guides. Integrations with LexisNexis, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg were used for external content, a nightly batch ran from the company's existing site with new content, and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was used to build a custom component for new content.
Users selected favorite sources and topics to follow, and the product did the rest. The algorithm sifted through the noise and pulled in headlines from the industry's most trusted sources based on user preferences. A digital coverage model was a cost-effective and scalable way to grow sales, develop loyalty, and nurture leads with these advisors. The business case used the company's Customer Experience Index, which showed a correlation between digital engagement and sales.
Results
The application was built and launched to pilot in under 6 months—meeting the goal to streamline content, provide advisors with access to custom content, grow their client expertise, and strengthen brand recognition.
The new pilot enabled advisors to:
• Stay on top of the market dynamics and driver perspectives.
• Develop their practice and their point of view.
• Connect more frequently and effectively with their clients.
Initial feedback from advisors was exceptionally positive.
"I feel the website is designed very well and extremely user-friendly. Also, the content is customized and has good individual articles from the company."
"The mixture of content and customizable dashboard makes this a great start-up/homepage option going forward. Similar things out there but this is among the best in execution."
"This tool is fantastic. Customizing content and thought leadership. Filtering what kind of information is fed. I'm extremely impressed by this so far. Looking forward to more..."
Analytics showed consistent and robust usage of the site with growing unique visitors over the established target, with the average session duration close to seven minutes. The product is successful, and now the goal is to scale to a broader audience.
