The wealth management industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and firms are turning to digital wealth management platforms (DWMPs) to accelerate their initiatives. In “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Wealth Management Platforms, Q1 2020” report, we identified the 13 most significant digital DWMP providers, which we evaluated across 26 criteria.

We define a DWMP as:

An enterprise wealth management platform that offers solutions to optimize client experience and increase financial advisor productivity across the entire investor lifecycle.

Our evaluation uncovered a critical need for enterprise wealth management firms to deploy a DWMP in order to accelerate capabilities in three important areas. Specifically, decision makers are looking for providers that:

  • Accelerate digital front-end experiences across channels. Financial services executives want to close gaps with customers’ digital retail banking experiences. Customers demand better digital investing experiences, and financial advisors want routine tasks such as onboarding to become digitized. For these reasons, executives are actively seeking out DWMPs to accelerate the process.
  • Offer AI-driven next-best-action capabilities. Servicing the mass affluent segment is only profitable if advice is delivered at scale. AI-driven next-best-action capabilities enable financial advisors to serve more clients per advisor, which drives profitability for the mass affluent segment. AI-driven recommendations are increasingly real-time, incorporating consideration of current market conditions and other factors, leading to higher conversion rates.
  • Enhance their breadth of functionality by offering access to third-party apps. Reference customers we spoke with value platforms that have an open architecture and provide options to plug and play various elements from the fintech ecosystem. They are more likely to utilize those digital-native fintechs that established DWMPs vet rather than partner with these firms directly, saving firms both time and effort when performing due diligence.

Read more on my evaluation in “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Wealth Management Platforms, Q1 2020” report (subscription required) to see how each provider measures up.