NEW YORK, NY — July 12, 2017. A report by L2 Inc, a business intelligence firm, has found that financial services brands have been slow to acknowledge the changing times and adapt their communication channels for the incoming generation of digital natives.
According to the report, only 60 percent of leading wealth management companies have extended customer service channels to Facebook Messenger. Of those, the majority of implementations cannot successfully answer open-ended questions regarding recent research, advisor matching, or job opportunities.
While 98 percent of financial services brands maintain on-site career portals for recruiting purposes, only 60 percent have extended those efforts to dedicated social media channels.
Despite this seeming lack of urgency, important market changes are well underway. Millennials begin their wealth management education a full 10 years earlier than their parents, and 66 percent of children are their parents’ fnancial advisor after inheriting their wealth. A host of FinTech companies have already begun to launch services that align with the values and expectations of millennial users. With the rise of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, millennials are also changing career paths. Six top MBA programs reported that fewer of their graduates were seeking employment in the banking industry in 2016 than in 2011.
A report suggests, that financial services brands should focus on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). “Current chatbots exhibit high failure rates when they diverge from an established logic tree. Constructs from the FinTech arena (e.g. Lemonade’s Maya) demonstrate the potential for successful automation of simple customer service functions,” says business intelligence firm, L2.
The company also noted that established institutions such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase are adapting recruitment collateral to channels where millennials live, including Spotify and Snapchat. Such experiments will help validate and inform wider reallocation of advertising budget down the road.
