Wealth Management: How Family Offices Can Improve Service and Efficiency With Open Finance Solutions

Helping high-net-worth families preserve and grow their wealth requires more than expert wealth management, financial planning, and asset management skills. It also requires complete visibility into all family assets – the ones that your office manages, and the ones that are held away. And all data must be accurate and up to date.

A fragmented, inaccurate financial picture prevents ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) family offices from providing the expert insights and service that clients expect and deserve. However, most family offices that use manual processes to consolidate wealth information from multiple custodians and other sources have exactly that.

Below we explore the challenges associated with these manual processes and share how open finance solutions for wealth management enable family offices to deliver better service and increase efficiency in managing their wealth assets.

How manual data consolidation impacts service

Research shows that over half of businesses leverage automation for reporting and planning. And for good reason: it ensures they have the accurate and timely insights required to make the best possible decisions. However, many family offices still rely on manual processes to pull together a complete picture of family wealth that’s used to drive investment and planning decisions.

This involves taking the time to obtain data from multiple custodians and re-keying data from pdf statements into wealth management systems. This process is tedious and means advisors spend less time than they should servicing clients. It’s also prone to errors—but even if data is entered correctly, it may be stale. Especially if the advisor is relying on family members to supply statements, which often provide end-of-month or end-of-quarter data.

The result? Advisors plan and make decisions based off information that’s inaccurate and out of date. While using data that’s a few days or weeks old in a relatively calm market is usually fine, if markets are volatile it’s a completely different ballgame: you need the most current data you can get.

Having an inaccurate picture of family wealth also makes it very difficult to quickly respond to opportunities or time-sensitive requests with confidence. If a UHNW client wants to purchase a new business, for example, but the advisor can’t quickly or easily obtain data for all held-away assets, they’re at a distinct disadvantage. By the time they gather all the information they need to determine if the purchase can be adequately funded, the opportunity may have slipped away.

A faulty financial picture leaves family offices struggling to deliver the high level of service families require—which ultimately jeopardizes relationships and trust.

How manual processes affect operational efficiency

Manually consolidating account information impacts more than just family financial planning and decision making. It also makes back-office tasks like billing error-prone and time-intensive. Billing on held-away assets is particularly complex when information must be compiled manually.

Obtaining the information required to accurately bill clients requires a complicated process that involves manually sorting through multiple statements to arrive at a complete financial picture.  This saps productivity and can introduce errors that lead to under- or over-billing.

Deliver better service and improve efficiency with open finance solutions
Open finance solutions designed to meet the needs of family offices provide the accurate, comprehensive view of wealth required for effective financial planning and back-office efficiency.

Solutions including Ninth Wave 360° provide a secure, unified, consolidated view of clients’ assets for wealth and investment portfolios. Ninth Wave 360° enables family offices to deliver the personalized service and insight families expect by automatically unifying managed and held-away assets within existing wealth management systems. Tax-lot-level financial data is pulled directly from leading custodians nightly using secure connectivity measures. It’s then merged with managed account data and reconciled to ensure the highest level of accuracy.

This holistic view of family finances optimizes planning and decision making. It also frees up advisors to spend more time servicing families by eliminating all manual data collection and entry.

The back office can also become significantly more efficient when the consolidated and cleansed data is leveraged for reporting and billing. Data can be automatically integrated into accounting and other internal systems, allowing staff to focus more time on high-value activities. Billing for held-away assets becomes easy, enabling offices that previously held back from performing this typically complex task to generate new revenue.

Open finance solutions for wealth management like Ninth Wave 360° also ensure complete data privacy by requiring families to permission external accounts for sharing. They also provide data security by allowing family offices to store all data on their own servers within their own office.

Enable cost-efficient data connectivity with Ninth Wave

While some family offices attempt to build their own data aggregation solutions for wealth management, they usually find out quickly that it’s an extremely expensive and resource-intensive endeavor.

Ninth Wave has been helping financial services companies enable secure data connectivity for over 20 years. Our robust, comprehensive platform increases reliability, transparency, and security, empowering wealth managers and family offices to efficiently track and report timely, accurate, and complete account, investment, and transaction data with the mission-critical apps and solutions their high net worth customers use to manage their assets. 

Contact us to discuss how you can optimize your financial data and processes to deliver a better wealth management experience and streamline back-office operations.