This is the second part of an interview with Scorpio Partnership's Seb Dovey.

This is the second half of an interview with Seb Dovey, managing partner and founder of Scorpio Partnership, the consultancy that focuses on the world’s wealth management industry. To view the first half of the interview, see here.

When banks survey or garner views from clients, are you finding specific techniques that really go well with clients and encourage thoughtful feedback? Are there some bad techniques and can you cite examples?
There are four main techniques to consider: face-to-face depth interviews, tele-depth interviews, direct mail and online. In reality, all techniques are viable in insight but it does ultimately boil down to timing and budgets.

The real decision factor in the methodology choice, in our opinion, is that the key to obtaining strategically useful insight that can make a material difference to the corporation’s bottom line is to have a statistically valid response base. This fact alone sets the conditions for the optimal methods used in HNW and UHNW insight. Typically, our approach is to undertake a blend of different methods to ensure that there is a total response level of at least 10 per cent of the business. This is around three times greater than the level required for statistical validity. The good news is that we have developed a premium luxury survey experience approach online, which makes a massive positive difference to the level of responses. Indeed, at a lot of firms we work with the response rates due to our processes are nearer 20-30 per cent.

To this end, we are still surprised when we see firms declare that they undertake satisfaction programmes but in reality they only receive responses from less than 1 per cent of their client base. In our experience, meaningful commercial decisions cannot be made with such a response level. Indeed, to do so would be risky. 

Another issue we find that impacts on the real value of the insight process is the composition of questions themselves. There are of course some now widely accepted standard questions, but a key issue now is to have a broader more detailed set of questions that can offer true business insight on the client journey that can be benchmarked. A lot of firms are not disciplined with this. So they tend to come back to learning very little in the process. In reality their insight effort has been compromised.

Ultimately, we have found that for insight to make a financial difference to the bottom line of a business requires a commitment to a process and a respect for the expertise of gathering insight. This is both a science and an art. Moreover, it is not a skill that many firms have invested in historically.

In marketing and positioning, what sort of approaches do you see succeeding and why? Where do you think the industry needs to improve its marketing in particular?
Our evidence points very clearly to the importance of marketing for both acquiring new business as well as retaining existing business. Based on the views of thousands upon thousands of HNWs and UHNWs around the globe the feedback shows that increasingly the top factor in their selection processes include their own research and evaluation of the wealth managers before choosing to go ahead. This means they will be going on to public resources to find out more. Typically this information quest will be via the web and while the corporate website will obviously be a good channel with controlled information on the business there is also the wider world of information on the wealth manager. What, for instance, is said about the firm in the media and what other firms they are listed alongside in those references all makes a huge difference. Crucially, there is also what is said on so-called social sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter as well as blogs and chat rooms. All of this is the responsibility of good marketing and marketeers.

Indeed, we now advise CMOs globally to embrace the fact that they have to have a disciplined oversight of at least 10 different content distribution platforms at any one point in time and each platform has different marketing requirements. Previously they may have had just one or two platforms. The above, in its own right, is a step change for the CMOs currently operating in the market today. But we can see from our client insight that there is a new wave about to enter into the industry which they need to get ahead of. This is the rating of operators and even of their individual advisors. We now know the level of influence this will have on the HNW and UHNW. We already collate data that tracks the strength of the client experience for each of the major institutions around the world and in effect privately rank how they are performing based on client feedback.

For selected firms we collect this at a banker level. We intend to be using this more and more to help guide CMOs of the future how to get prepared for the day when there are publicly available ranking guides in place for the sector.
 
With all the industry consolidation going on (closure of booking centres, rebrands, changes to minimum investor requirements, etc) how is this affecting strategic business decision-making, sales, client care and reputational management?
In any fast growing industry, just like a leading financial centre cityscape such as London, the competitive landscape is always undergoing constant change. HNW and UHNW clients are aware of this and while at times it is unsettling they are a resilient bunch as long as their ability to have their affairs managed effectively is not impeded by the changes of the firms. What surprises us, however, is how at times this process of engagement in a world of change is not consistently managed. Ultimately wealth management is at its heart a communications business and if that level of communication is not well maintained it impacts on the client experience. Over time what this does is undermine the confidence of the client in the firm and its direct commitment to their personal interest.

In our experience through undertaking insight programmes this confidence can be reinforced or reinstated through close monitoring of the feedback results. Through detailed analysis of the results it is possible to identify the clients and client groups that may be “at risk” and it is even possible to determine what remedial actions might be required. In reality, a business needs to be in touch with the pulse and sentiment of its complete client base. Naturally one resource to determine this is the relationship managers and their interactions with the audience. But we have found that a very reliable alternate source of insight and intelligence is the feedback process. Indeed, CEOs that embrace this appear to sleep much easier at night.

Finally, Scorpio has itself expanded under its new corporate structure. What sort of projects are you taking on?

The riddle we seek daily to answer for ourselves is: what wealth needs next. We would like to think that we have carved out a market space for thinking intelligently and creatively about the future of wealth. To that end, we have pushed boundaries that some would have rather remained untouched.

Looking to the future we expect even more respect of what the data is telling us all about consumer behaviour and demands. It is beginning to have truly predictive qualities. Indeed, we can already see with confidence the blueprint of the future elite wealth managers around the globe. This is incredibly exciting to us. For those with us on the journey it is invaluable. For Scorpio Partnership, we are expecting to undertake even more assignments where the insight process becomes the “intel inside” that enables a business to have that edge which ensures they are on the right side of the balancing act of commercial success as opposed to financial failure. Critically, we now link the feedback of the client in terms of their client experience and future needs to the feedback of the advisors as well as the financial implications – such as salaries, bonuses and revenues – of achieving and maintaining the relationship.

This unique linkage between the revenue generated by the client business to the costs associated to deliver the products and services is the game changer. Moreover, we have now built-in parameters to benchmark this so that any operator can determine where they are relative to the market. After all, like Team Sky and the elite performance programme they have implemented, the industry has to acknowledge great data only really makes sense when it is compared relative to the market.