You’ve likely heard for the last few years that your institution needs to offer clients a mobile financial experience. At some point in the past you may have added a mobile app to make sure that your name shows up in web and app store searches.

Since the initial rush earlier in the decade to get a mobile app out, too many firms stopped there, and they haven’t considered how their mobile app can continually influence the ongoing client experience that an individual has with their institution.

This article will shine a spotlight on why customized mobile apps are necessary for today’s clients, and how adding integrated capabilities into your mobile experience can help differentiate your client offering.

Promoting Client Engagement with a Native Mobile App

High-net-worth clients today expect the ability to access their favorite services and products through their phones. They already get updates and notifications from their favorite news sources, websites, social media accounts, and more—your institution should be available as an option to keep their financial life front and center as well.

And although many may believe that older Americans may not be as tech-dependent as younger generations, research has shown time and again that smartphone use is typically either largely the same or even slightly higher in Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

The fact of the matter is that mobile now dictates how we access the internet.

The increase in web traffic to mobile sites and apps over the past decade has been monumental. As recently as 2010, only five percent of websites were browsed via mobile phone, but by 2016, mobile surpassed desktop with 51 percent of site traffic, and mobile traffic continues to grow.

The increase of mobile traffic has also paired with the rise in mobile apps, with over 178 billion app downloads in 2017. The number of apps downloaded in a year is expected to rise to over 250 billion by 2022. Consumers expect there to be an app for everything; if you don’t have one, you are failing to meet standard, modern expectations.

Strangely enough given all the research, less than one in three financial firms offers a mobile app today. Are you one of them?

If so, you have three options: build your own proprietary solution, select an app provided by a software partner that you can customize, or combine the two methods by building your own and utilizing software integrations to include capabilities from your software partners.

The first option of building your own can be a costly one.

If you build a custom app, you can build it to your exact specifications, but the downside is that custom app development can easily cost over $1 million—especially when you want to a build a “native” app, or one that’s specific to each different operating system.

The required customer service and maintenance troubleshooting is then fully on you and your team to handle. The time spent may end up being even more costly than the price.

The second choice, to partner with a firm like Wealth Access to offer a private-label mobile app to clients, can be a much more cost- and time-friendly selection. Your institution can be up and running quickly by selecting your customization options to white-label the app to your brand and tailor the client experience to your users.

The third option is a combination. Your firm may have chosen to build its own proprietary app, but you can extend its capabilities and enhance the client experience through the use of APIs, which allow your various pieces of software to share data back and forth.

With the ability to integrate other existing technology providers and even take advantage of custom programming tools, a Wealth Access mobile app may be what your institution needs to provide the client experience that you’ve always wanted to offer.

Expanding Mobile Capabilities with Open Integration

The Wealth Access platform provides you with a completely customizable, private-labeled mobile digital experience for your high-net worth clients, right out of the box.

Setup is simple, and we do the heavy lifting of publishing the app to the Apple App Store and Google Play store for our clients.

But as we we’ve already covered, it is possible to build your own mobile app, and some firms have gone through the process of significantly investing in proprietary software that they don’t want to give up.

Other times, a firm may simply want to develop a more unique client experience customized to their business and the expectations their clients have of what that looks like.

It’s cases like those that call for an open architecture approach to integration so your mobile app can take full advantage of all the tools that Wealth Access offers.

We provide our full platform functionality through widget and data APIs so you can either pair up Wealth Access with existing software that’s unique to the banking and trust industry, or use it within a proprietary portal of your own design.

First, though, let’s get a definition of what “API” means out of the way for those who don’t spend their days writing code for computer programs.

API: An Application Program Interface is a set of “rules” for how two systems can share data and functionality between each other automatically.

The business benefits—and benefits to your mobile experience—of using an API can be tremendous.

How Bank and Trust Institutions Benefit from Open Architecture Integration

Here are just a few of the ways that the Wealth Access open architecture approach to integration can help your firm create a more unique and impactful client experience.

• Wealth Access APIs are fully mobile-responsive to support your institution’s digital and mobile strategy. You don’t have to be locked into advising your clients to visit your portal on a desktop computer instead of their mobile phone, because our widgets and data will adapt to fit any visual display.
• Using existing, tested data widgets from Wealth Access provide speed to market so you can get new software tools deployed in a matter of days, rather than taking many months to build them. Additionally, integrating widgets from Wealth Access includes our ongoing support and development, which frees your institution’s developers to focus on enhancing core products instead of maintaining updates.
• Providing a comprehensive financial report to clients becomes simple with our Aggregation-as-a-Service offering. There’s no need to build extensive and complex data collection processes, with all the internal operational and client support infrastructure necessary to maintain it. Wealth Access handles all the aggregation connections so your team can focus on clients, and clients can connect multiple accounts into their protal without frustration.
• Selecting only the Wealth Access widgets you want to use gives you complete customization ability for the advisors and clients accessing your portal, so you can build the experience you want.
• Lastly, our API gives you full access to all of your Wealth Access data, allowing you to create new business intelligence reports or add information to your existing data warehouse to implement even more refined analytics and insights.

All of these features are built natively into the Wealth Access app, and they’re also open to you through our API if you use proprietary technology. We support you in whatever way your firm works best.

Taken all together, these benefits all have the client experience at their core. Whether you’re using a widget in a portal to help clients better understand their finances or you’re creating business intelligence reports to make future plans for your business, the client is ultimately the user who benefits most from an open and mobile-focused approach to integration.

Integration with Bank and Trust-Specific Tools

In addition to the ways you can integrate Wealth Access with proprietary tools you’ve built, you can also take advantage of our out-of-the-box integration capabilities.

We work with many of the systems your institution uses and relies on every day including trust, custody, and portfolio accounting systems; performance measurement reporting; financial planning tools; proposal generation; tax optimization; CRM, and many more.

Ready-to-use integrations like these bring additional efficiencies to your team with simple, straightforward and fast setup that gets you up and running quickly with flexible solutions you can tailor to your firm’s needs.

Providing mobile access to your clients puts you where they are at all times, and further expanding your offerings through integration helps you provide a comprehensive experience thats puts you at the center of their financial life.

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