Mobile technology has improved productivity and efficiency for knowledge workers everywhere. Beyond photo sharing and social communication apps, many industries benefit by having industry- and job-specific apps. These apps help people do their jobs more easily, effectively, and from anywhere. Even wealth managers are benefitting from going mobile.
Rather than being tethered to their desks or creating bottlenecks through their absence, wealth management personnel can complete more work and help more people by going mobile. They can work remotely, give approvals between meetings, or travel to far-flung locations because they can still function.
Here are seven benefits of wealth management firms going mobile to help you understand how to be more effective.
1) You always have your device
When Steve Jobs was designing the iPhone, he wanted it to essentially be like a part of ourselves because we would always have it in our hands. That means you have access to your necessary information literally in the palm of your hands.
You’re not tied to your desk, you’re not tied to a laptop or desktop, and you don’t need Wi-Fi. As long as you’ve got a cell phone and a cellular signal, you can still conduct business. You have access to email, text messages, notes, mobile apps, and web-based applications.
2) You don’t need your laptop
Five or ten years ago, we didn’t have these mobile capabilities; your business functions had to be done on a laptop or desktop computer. You needed electricity, you needed Wi-Fi, and you needed a place to sit down. It was convenient if you traveled, but it’s gotten even easier.
While many digital nomads are mobile enough with a laptop and a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi connection, that’s not always available when you’re on the road or trying to find your way around a new city. Not to mention, laptops usually don’t have cellular capabilities, so you must either rely on a mobile hotspot or tether your computer to your mobile phone.
A mobile wealth management platform lets you work wherever you’re sitting or standing. You could be at a hotel, in line at the coffee shop, out for a walk, at the gym, going into a meeting, coming out of a meeting, on a plane, on a train, or in the car (as long as you’re not driving). Wherever you are, being mobile means you can be productive.
3) You can eliminate bottlenecks
When wealth managers and account officers leave the bank or are unreachable, they create bottlenecks of pending items that require approval and processing. There could be an inbox full of deposits and withdrawals pending approval. But without those key signatures, they’re just a pile of electronic forms.
But with a mobile app, you can do work from anywhere, anytime. Approve transactions, transfer funds, send instructions, read reports, complete forms, and review and upload notes. As soon as forms and requests come in, you can view and approve them. The rest of your team can work and stay productive rather than waiting for you.
4) You can create more business
Being mobile means being out of the office. You have more time to travel between appointments, meet with clients and prospects, deepen relationships, and generate revenue.
You can’t do that sitting behind your desk. You need to meet your prospects in the field and show them how they can protect their money. But if you’re in the office for two hours a day dealing with routine tasks, that’s five to ten customers or prospects you missed out on.
If you could manage many of those routine tasks out of the office, it would mean more meetings, more customers, and more revenue.
5) You can take care of tasks immediately
Imagine you’re at lunch with a client, and the client says, “We just added our son to our phone bill.” That means the payment/payment schedule has changed. Rather than writing a note in your notebook and taking it back to the office to process, you can manage it right there.
Quickly opening up a mobile app and updating the payment schedule takes care of your client’s issue. They appreciate your attention and quick response, and they’re happy with the results.
Or, if your client has a more complex task to manage on the phone, you can record action items and activities on the app and then assign them to other users so they can work on them as you head out to your next meeting.
6) You can reach a younger customer base
There is a shift in the financial industry as Millennials and Generation Z eschew the paper-based, relationship-based banking that their parents and grandparents enjoyed. They base their banking decisions on whether their financial institution has an app and whether they can see and manage their money through it.
That means they expect their account managers to be mobile-conversant. If they want to make a withdrawal or transfer funds, they don’t want to hear that a primitive approval process is holding up their investments. They want to know that the people managing their money have a firm grasp on technology and its possibilities.
7) You can work remotely
The last two years have disrupted the work world. While the world is recovering and people are returning to the office, there are still times you have to work from home or the road. Now that we have seen that everyone can work from home, including bankers, it’s becoming an expectation and a perk of the job. But for wealth management officers, it may be critical.
By going mobile, you can slip seamlessly into remote mode, and no one will notice any drop in your productivity and efficiency. Work done from your office is just as good as work done from your home or a coffee shop.
Being mobile doesn’t mean you never have to set foot in your office again. Plenty of work still needs to be done on a regular computer in an office. But there’s no longer a need to stay tethered to a desk for those mundane, low-effort tasks that normally take up a lot of your time and keep you from doing business-building, revenue-generating work.
With a system like Cheetah, all the input and creation are done on the laptop, and all the retrieval and reviewing are done on your mobile phone. You can learn how that all works on our website or by scheduling a free demonstration of our Cheetah and CheetahGO products.
Authored by: Cam Dowless, associate technical product manager for Accutech Systems Corp.
