The year 2020 was a strange year indeed. To use the term used once by Queen Elizabeth “Annus horribilis’ would be an apt description of the year we have left behind. It is time to reflect a bit on what happened and make new resolutions.
Normally, trends don’t dramatically change in short intervals. However, last year was certainly special. Be it the impact of the pandemic or the ideological/political disparity becoming more pronounced, the societal impact on the trends is certainly bigger than the changes in industry or technology. Let's examine briefly the top 10 trends in this blog. I will drill-down into them in follow-up articles in more details.
Top 10 trends impacting wealth management in 2021 on Societal, Technology & Industry dimensions:
1. Goal-based investing
Commoditisation of investment advice, beating market benchmarks is passé. Wealth management is now holistic, goals-based and performance oriented aimed at achieving clients’ goals within agreed timeframes.
Read the blog post where Sameer deep dives into Goal-based investing
2. Sustainable investing
Sustainable investing has moved away over the year from being a fad to a clear trend. Compliance update in EU (MiFID II, Solvency II, IDD, UCITS & AIMFD) will lead to Eco Labelling Framework by Q4 2021. Furthermore, disclosure regulation as well as Taxonomy regulation will continue to be implemented in steps. The societal impact of investing (application of ESG - Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) is already becoming an integral part of core portfolio management strategy.
3. Demographic transition
A change of guard from the old to the new is happening. Mandates (Advisory relations) and well as portfolios (inheritance) are transitioning from the older generation to the younger. With $68 trillions of Great Wealth Transfer well underway, the investor is changing. Ageing and retiring wealth advisory experts are leaving behind a shortfall that (hopefully) will be supported by technology.
4. Extreme personalisation
Model portfolio allocation will not be enough. Investors will demand advice that is highly customised to suit specific needs, goals and ambitions. This is the result of growing awareness of the investors as well as availability of technology accelerators to make this happen.
5. Democratization of investing
The democratisation trend should not be viewed from the perspective of emergence of the retail investor alone. The instrument universe itself is expanding and allowing non-traditional opportunities - digital tokens, wine, art etc.
Read Sameer's blog post dedicated to Democratization of wealth
6. Disruption by technology
The technological disruption wave – the usual culprits – analytics, data mining, data advisory, digitalisation, access to huge databanks through custom APIs etc. As technology facilitates distribution disruption, it goes without saying that the pressure on fees/margins will continue to escalate.
7. Unique economic paradigm
A unique economic combination of low or negative interest rates, government infused liquidity, high debt, low growth, pandemic impact, trade wars bringing in a plethora of challenges and uncertainties.
8. Convergence and competition
There is now a continued convergence of brokerage and private banking models to serve affluent business clients. Robo advisories have brought in technology driven disruption in the competitive landscape.
9. Security and compliance challenges
Increased technological penetration has resulted in handling a unique set of security challenges and increasingly stringent compliance requirements. New and broader frameworks covering business practices as well as technology utilisation are evolving to protect the citizens and ensure business continuity at the same time.
10. Advent of the underserved
Many underserved market segments, for e.g. women, are now being increasingly targeted with special customised offerings. The pandemic brought a bunch of 1st time investors to the market. So did the meteoric rise of the bitcoin phenomena- especially after serious institutional investors adding digital currencies to their portfolios.
Learn more about the underserved segments in this blog post
These, I believe, will be the trends that will dominate 2021. Some may have a stronger run than others. In the follow-up blogs in this series, each of these mega-trends will be examined in more details. Let's also touch base on the possible strategies to cope and benefit from these trends.
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At TietoEVRY we support our Financial Services customers with full-stack Capital Markets and Digital Insurance & Wealth Solutions. Feel free to reach out to me or my colleagues to know more!
READ THE NEXT POSTS IN THE SERIES:
Sameer is responsible for insurance and wealth solutions. He actively promotes open ecosystem thinking that powers our WealthMapper and Insurance-in-a-Box platforms. At TietoEVRY, he has a long experience of working within the Healthcare, Insurance and Wealth domains. Prior to this, he worked as a product manager and a brand manager in the food, processing and packaging industry. He is passionate about translating technology innovations to business reality leading to better quality of human life.