Supporting the Financial Advisor and Investor Relationship
NOVEMBER 2017
Goal Grow this asset manager’s advisor business by enabling and supporting the advisor-investor relationship
Role Envisioner and Strategist
Client Invesment management and advisory services provider
Scope 12 months, $1M+, 5-person team core consultancy team, 5-person extended client stakeholder team
Steering and analysis workshop at client headquarters
Business Challenge
Through a human-centered innovation process, how might this investment manager and financial services provider grow their advisor business?
Project Goals
This project had two goals:
Introduce an innovation process to the organization through a project with a core client team fully embedded at every stage of the project
Identify and envision opportunities that will grow advisor business for our client by strengthening the relationship between advisors, their clients, and this organization as a financial services provider.
Project Summary
Interviews with advisors and investors across United States.
Approach
The project approach followed the design process:
Learning: what do we know?
Analysis: what does it all mean?
Synthesis: what should we do?
Envisioning: what should that look like?
Resonance: what attributes make the right experience?
We also conducted an innovation capability diagnostic for the organization.
Our client worked alongside our team through all the above stages to immerse themselves in a new approach to innovation (the design process).
Design process immersion and worksessions with client
Key Findings
[Internally] Doing the best work we can vs doing the work that our client can take part in: to fully integrate our client core team into our process, we worked slower than we would have liked, and struggled with consistent quality output.
[Externally] ‘Loyalty’ = inertia. Our client assumed loyalty or “high NPS” as a key design factor in the ideal experience for advisors and investors. Our research showed that what our client called “loyalty” was actually inertia and a lack of understanding of what good or quality is when it comes to ‘good advice from an advisor.”
Recommendations to establish advisor trust, grow advisor business
Outcomes
Impact
Follow-on work to develop an Invision MVP based on the opportunities identified through this project. We substantially grew our client’s ability and appetite to do Human-Centered Innovation.
Deliverables:
Invision prototype MVP
Project Room as Innovation Storytelling Room at client headquarters
Insights, opportunities areas, roadmap to lighthouse with prioritization of concepts to test
Key Strategic Research Findings
Our project process was a new (but known) approach for our client to practice.
Introducing innovation to an organization
This project served as a diagnostic case study for the organization: a real business challenge (our project) whose insights and content the client can act upon (or not), giving our team a view into the true dynamics and pressures of the organization that in turns support innovation.
Key elements critical to introducing and promoting an innovation process to this organization:
Engagement and sponsorship by a C-level sponsor team
Dedicated resources and participation by cross-functional core and extended teams
Close collaboration that opens the ‘project room door’ and bring the client on the journey
Socialization of the work through presentations, coaching and storytelling tools that help drive understanding, energy and buy-in across the broader organization
Our client came with an initial hypothesis driven by loyalty as measured by NPS.
Reassessing an initial hypothesis
The initial focus of this project was to understand and address loyalty in the investor-advisor relationship and how it would then provide value back to our client. We shifted from the original hypothesis of loyalty (what we discovered as inertia) towards the need to cultivate value, fit, and trust among advisors and investors. Specifically:
Value: our client can develop informed investors so they recognize good advice and value their advisor
Fit: our client can make it easier for advisors and investors to find each other and make a good match
Trust: our client can demonstrate they are a credible and committed partner for advisors.