The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement

22 May 2018

Our process improvement work is helping us provide a more efficient service to our clients.

Innovation in wealth management is not just about embracing advanced technology like blockchain and artificial intelligence. It can be just as important to improve existing processes within a business. With this in mind, we’ve been working to improve business-as-usual processes to ensure that we offer a more efficient service to our clients.

Part of this work is automating many tasks that were previously manual processes. For example, our settlement team’s new trade check template can automatically populate some of the comments and has a button to create the ‘Nominee Payments’, ‘Expected Funds In’, ‘Settlement Today (All)’, and ‘Failed Trades’ tabs. This helps to save between two and four hours a week of resource, which can then be spent on more value-add activities!

Aiming to achieve operational efficiency is something that is very important throughout the wealth management industry. A 2016 report by Clearstream showed that 30% of wealth managers thought that improved operational efficiency was the most important thing that they needed to focus on. Efficiency gains can be achieved through automation and improved processes, with freed up resource being used to tackle the key priorities for wealth managers - staying on top of regulatory change, ensuring a high quality client experience and achieving business growth.

Our BAU process improvement project stemmed from our collaboration with the University of Surrey’s Centre for the Digital Economy. The first step in this programme was to get suggestions from staff of some of the processes that could be improved. Internal process improvement forums led to over 100 ideas being suggested by members of staff. From these, 13 ideas were identified as being priorities for improvement.

Business analysts Neil Balch and Nicole Lowes said ‘This has been a great initiative that we have enjoyed creating the roadmap for and helping the business stay on track. This has been both interesting and helpful, and it has been very rewarding hearing about the time and money saved implementing the improvements to Multrees’ current processes. We have also benefitted from getting to know people in the business that we wouldn’t usually work directly with and have also learned a lot about different areas of the business.'