Financial Services

Can lifecycle management make clients happier?

September 6, 2019

In brief

A strong approach to Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) can boost a financial firm’s competitive stance while increasing its clients’ wallet size.
Effective lifecycle management encompasses the entire client relationship and offers a 360-degree view of each client.
A CLM model can address compliance, regulatory concerns and data privacy, plus help identify risky clients and mitigate concerns early.
Today’s technology allows opportunities for modular solutions versus a full, fixed platform implementation.

Is your financial business’s client management process doing all it can to respond to and exceed client expectations? A well-built CLM approach is not necessarily a direct path to ecstatic clients. But Accenture’s report on building effective CLM finds a bad or poorly coordinated CLM process can damage relationships with clients, leading them to move their assets elsewhere.

By contrast, a smooth, holistic CLM process…strengthens a firm’s competitive differentiation while reducing costs and increasing its clients’ wallet size.

Building a holistic CLM program

In our experience, clients value financial providers that offer consistency, speed and efficiency. Clients don’t want to deal with repetitive requests, such as multiple asks for the same data related to onboarding. A well-built approach to CLM can help you deliver on each of these.

The CLM process encompasses the entire client relationship—beginning when a client is still a prospect and continuing through onboarding, account maintenance, changes in account status, profitability analysis, and legal and regulatory compliance. Multiple platforms, teams and procedures are involved at every point along the way. Each should demonstrate consistency, efficiency and seamlessness.

The gains are significant, both for clients—who benefit from a holistic experience—and for the financial organization. Many of a financial firm’s gains can translate into real value. For example, the sales group can leverage a strong CLM program to:

Identify new up- and cross-sell opportunities

With the 360-degree view of the entire client relationship afforded by CLM, the sales team can better design and implement growth strategies.

Eliminate red tape; reduce onboarding time

An up-front process that identifies and explains obstacles lays groundwork for a better overall relationship, while reducing onboarding costs.

More quickly spot potential risks

Good CLM should include rules for early indication of risks around particular clients, so the sales team can act to prevent relationship damage.

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Get a CLM efficiency boost

In times of ongoing cost cutting and function trimming, CLM offers benefits in addition to better client management. It can, for example:

Create a flexible approach. Firms can establish a flexible, configurable process that adjusts to changing risks and risk tolerance, permitting consistent compliance management and aligning client management with the overall business strategy.
Scale back manual effort. Manual processes can be reduced via workflows that are based on preferred industry practices and bolstered by third-party utilities.
Aim for proactivity. By using proactive key performance indicators, instead of reacting to complaints, an organization can support a better client experience while improving process management.
Support risk management and data privacy. By embedding data privacy and data storage regulations into daily practices, and building a proactive communication channel with clients, the firm can demonstrate its commitment to data privacy.
Go modular. Finding the right fixed platform technology used to be a costly endeavor. With today’s new technologies, firms can pursue a technology ecosystem that offers a modular approach—one that can perform complex activities for relatively low cost.

Can you get to better CLM?

Accenture’s integrated Balanced Change Maturity Model for CLM takes a further step toward helping financial firms build efficiency. Our approach can address large concerns, such as client views that currently offer less than 360-degree perspectives, lack of holistic risk management and the growing cost of regulatory change.

Our model features stages that build on each other. After completing the first three stages, involving setting global policy, building a single data model and establishing data governance, firms are positioned to tackle the transformation stages, which include building a common process and operating model, and integrating technology. When all stages are complete, the client management process can transform from its starting point—which often was enmeshed in a product or division perspective—to a fully formed digital platform with a client focus.

Our solution also can address needs around client rationalization, digitization, client tiering and cloud adoption. Learn how we can help your financial firm revamp its CLM program and gain a full picture of your clients.