As our lives have become more digital and our preference for digital services increased, banks have responded by focusing a significant amount of time and attention on the digital customer experience. Today, a consumer can even choose to bank with institutions who deliver a complete digital customer journey from prospecting to onboarding to digital delivery of a full range of financial services.

Banking however is a people business and almost nothing is as personal as one's money. With this firmly in mind, banks continue to learn, test, and adjust their strategies in pursuit of the perfect digital banking experience. Perfecting this process thru digitization has a tendency to make the human connection becomes less obvious. We talk a lot today about remote work but these connections are now remote connections and different than the way banking used to be. As such, the connections and pull and even forgiveness with humans are not as obvious or as easily accessible as digital capabilities that directly impact the speed of execution, productivity, and even price and fees.

The importance of human connection is one reason why so many banks are now increasing their focus on wealth management. This is one area where emotional engagement can still be differentiated yet profitable enough to focus on. In fact, according to a 2022 report from Research Dive, the global wealth management market is expected to hit$890.90 billion by 2028 and grow at a CAGR of 7.1% from 2021 to 2028.

We hear it a lot from our clients about wanting to better serve this segment. They want to build a bridge between human connection and digitization. We certainly agree about this segment and marrying the client experience. One of our four key themes in the Cisco Portfolio Explorer for Financial Services is Customer Experience. It is about the modern customer journeys starting digitally and then integrating self-service and advisor-based customer interaction capabilities.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Ashley Longabaugh, Principal Analyst at Celent, about their new research report "Digitizing for Impact: Putting the Wealth Management Client at the Center of Client Onboarding".  In this interview we talk about the onboarding process for wealth management clients. It is still a highly manual process yet there are demands by both the client and the advisor to digitize and increase satisfaction and efficiency. In this ten-minute video you'll hear what Celent has learned in their research and I'll discuss how Cisco can play a part in creating a holistic solution with our Webex suite of solutions. I hope you enjoy.