Congratulations to 2022 Wealth Manager Model Award Winners
We celebrate Bank of America and Merrill, Ethic, PAYTM and BBVA Switzerland on being Celent's Model Wealth Manager 2022 award winners!
Links to the case studies and interviews with the winners can be found on our I&I Week Platform.
Winner: Bank of America, Mobile App
Category: Client Experience
Synopsis: The Bank of America (BofA) mobile app offers multi-relationship clients the ability to view and manage all of their banking, investment, wealth, and retirement relationships from a single mobile app. Since the addition of investment features to the mobile app in 2020, there has been a 90% increase (as of November 2021) in the number of clients accessing investment features across all of BofA’s mobile apps— including brokerage account activity, securities research, and trading—thus increasing clients’ visibility and interest in investment and wealth products, enhancing client retention, and deepening relationships.
Winner: Merrill, Digital Wealth Overview
Category: Client Experience
Synopsis: The Digital Wealth Overview (DWO) is a tool for financial advisors that provides clients with a personalized, interactive video of their financial status, including Merrill’s advisory and brokerage accounts, BOA’s banking accounts, and any externally linked accounts. The video is narrated by Erica®, BOA’s virtual assistant. The primary use cases are supporting the client’s annual financial review and maintaining ongoing digital engagement with clients. DWO also enables client interactions. Clients can pause the video to gather more information about the illustrations. At the end of each video, clients also have the option to schedule appointments or learn more about areas such as budgeting and spending. This first iteration of DWO is a powerful prototype that can be easily enhanced with additional capabilities.
Winner: Ethic, Personalized ESG Portfolios and Impact Reporting
Category: Products and Platforms
Synopsis: Ethic won the model wealth manager award under the category of products and platforms primarily for its impact reporting capabilities. As sustainable investing grows in popularity, investors are seeking more education on ESG and a deeper understanding of how their portfolios are impacting the issues they care about most. Through the Ethic platform, advisors and wealth managers are able to automate the creation of sustainably-focused, passive equity investment portfolios that seek to align clients’ impact and financial goals. The platform also provides clients with easy-to-understand impact reporting that goes beyond financial returns and delivers greater transparency into how portfolios make a difference when it comes to a variety of sustainability issues.
Winner: BBVA Switzerland, Enabling the HNW and Mass Affluent to Store and Trade Crypto Asset
Category: Products and Platforms
Synopsis: Over the past decade, banking and payment systems have not kept up with the pace of advancements in the digital economy. Today, the dichotomy between ecommerce platforms and banking and payment systems is unsustainable. The gap between 24/7 trading and clearing and settlement lags needs to be closed. Distributed ledger technology (DLT), smart contracts, and digital assets are showing promise as means to align the performance of banking/payments systems with that of the digital economy. Private banking clients of tier one institutions had often had to utilize fintech channels to acquire cryptocurrency exposure. Platforms such as Coinbase have offered a temporary means of direct access that doesn’t involve crypto-based ETFs. BBVA Switzerland, however, has managed to offer high net worth and mass affluent clients the ability to store and trade Bitcoin. But even more importantly, BBVA offers clients as a seamless experience that integrates traditional asset classes with crypto blending them into a unified solution for clients.
Winner: PAYTM, All-in-One-Wealth Platform
Category: Products and Platforms
Synopsis: Paytm Money built a comprehensive offering with mutual funds, a pension offering, stockbroking services, pre-open IPO investing, ETFs, and derivatives trading, as well as a wealth community masterclass, on one platform. This was developed entirely internally, without the consultation of third party providers. Paytm Money is built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, enabling greater speed and efficiency when it comes to testing and deploying updates. The platform has been able to garner 7.8 million users across India in just three short years.