Every job has its mundane administrative tasks, and we all hate them. In the world of wealth management, relationship managers are pressured to serve as many existing customers and prospects as they can with the ultimate goal of increasing the assets under management (AUM)—one of the key metrics used to measure their productivity. Similarly, in the insurance industry, financial advisors are driven to maximize their time with clients. Administrative tasks are not only irritating, they also reduce a salesperson’s paycheck by cutting into his or her time with customers.
But organizational forces in both the wealth management and insurance industries are conspiring against their top revenue generators. According to Seismic, a staggering 65% of a relationship manager’s time is spent on business processes like account opening, accessing collaterals, and creating customized portfolio review with customers.
In the last few years, financial institutions and insurance companies have sought to free up their salespeople by investing in productivity tools. Mobile apps, in particular, hold the promise of speeding up processes like filling out client forms for clients, creating proposals, and building portfolios. They are also, in theory, a great way to deliver real-time market insights.
But mobile apps are only effective when relationship managers and advisors use them.
AppDynamics Business iQ allows organizations to measure the effectiveness of their mobile apps by providing a window into user behavior. In the example below, I show how a financial institution can instantly see how many relationship managers have clicked on a market insight to access AI-driven financial advice—a killer feature for increasing AUM. The dashboard, which I created in the AppDynamics demo environment, also shows how many relationship managers proceeded to “Add to Cart” and re-balanced their clients’ portfolios. We see that as relationship managers moved through the funnel, they increasingly abandoned the app. The overall conversion rate is just 5.62%. Slightly over one in twenty relationship managers used the application to send a proposal to their clients.
Below, I show how to a create conversion funnel using a built-in widget. It is as simple as going to the Add Widget tab and selecting Analytics and Funnel Analysis.
You then select the business transaction that you’d like to include in the conversion funnel.
You can also quickly design a custom widget to highlight information such as the relationship managers who are generating the most new business.
Figure: RMs with the highest new AUM
Or see at a glance the relationship managers who are sending the highest number of proposals. Moreover, you can break down the proposals by customer type. So you can see which customer type (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond) the relationship managers are creating the proposals for. In the example below, you can see that relationship manager “aleftik” is sending all 960 proposals to only “Silver” tier customers. Relating the previous graph where the highest AUM is “aleftik” and he focuses all his effort to selling to the “Silver” tier customers, it appears that this is a desirable behaviour and strategy that the business should educate and share among other relationship managers.
Figure: RMs with the highest “Send Proposal” Transactions
Moving beyond the performance metrics of individual relationship managers and financial advisors, you can combine technical and performance metrics in order to see if updates to an application are negatively affecting sales performance.
You can see from the above conversion graph that version 2 of the code has significantly reduced the slowness (yellow and orange color within the bar) for Portfolios Summary page, positively impacting the conversion ratio from 5.53% to 14.52%
The business may also want to identify relationship managers who are not using the new productivity tool enough. Below is a way to create such a list of managers with the least number of page hits.
Figure: Number of page visit on “Market Insights” by RMs in ascending order
You can even put all of this together to have a customizable dashboard combining both technical and business performance metrics. At a glance you’re able to see the new AUM achieved by the wealth management group using the iPad application, transaction health of each key business process, top performing relationship managers and the products sold, as well as relationship managers who have yet to adopt the new application as a productivity tool.
With AppDynamics Business iQ, institutions do not need to wait for a month or a week to see business insights in relation to application performance and user behaviour. All the information is available at a glance in real time.
