The following interview forms part of sister publication WealthBriefing’s Technology and Operations Trends Report for 2015, which will be launched later this month.

In this special preview, Steffen Binder, managing director at MyPrivateBanking Research, outlines key action points for wealth managers wishing to get up to speed on mobile.

In recent years the wealth management industry has been busily working to catch-up with the retail banking sector on the mobile front. The latter’s more rapid progress has been fueled by greater competitive forces, budgets and economies of scale, while the former has had to overcome far greater security concerns. Strong appetite from both clients and advisors for mobile capabilities has driven wealth managers on, however, and many have developed apps for both sides making key interactions like annual review meetings a far slicker affair.

Progress on mobile apps is proving to be patchy, according to experts in this area, however. Perhaps partially as a symptom of the budgetary constraints and corporate inertia, which will be highlighted in the Technology and Operations Trends Report 2015, it seems that many wealth managers have not been investing in their mobile capabilities as committedly as they should be in today’s technology milieu.

“Overall, my impression is that at this point mobile is really not number one priority for wealth managers and private banks,” said Steffen Binder, managing director of MyPrivateBanking Research (an organization that produces an annual ranking of wealth managers’ mobile apps). “Everyone is doing something - a little bit here, a little bit there - and there are a few banks which are really good, but the majority are well behind.”

So what makes an exceptional app?

According to Binder, there are several features which together make for an exceptional wealth management app for HNW individuals.

“Clients need to get the sense that the app was designed specifically for them in terms of quality, design and functionality, and that their bank is taking into consideration that they are valuable HNW clients,” he said. All too often, they are merely offered “re-skinned” versions of retail banking apps since just 63 per cent of wealth managers have a HNW-specific offering.

In Binder’s view, part of this specificity is recognizing that HNW clients “are by the nature of things more interested in investing and so require in-depth tools allowing them to follow and analyze their portfolio, with details, like daily performance cutting across asset classes, by currency”. (This he concedes, however, is “easy to talk about, but not necessarily easy to implement”).

Correspondingly, he believes that providing high-impact investment research via mobile devices is particularly important for (highly mobile, highly entrepreneurial) HNW clients, since time spent sitting on a train or plane is the ideal opportunity to catch up with the latest reports.

Rock-solid security provisions are clearly paramount, Binder continued, since HNW clients are naturally higher risk. This, he explained, includes not only taking extra security measures in a technical sense, but also a robust communication strategy too. “Most online fraud is down to human error; it’s the biggest factor,” he said. “People use public Wi-Fi; they note down their passwords. These are simple things, but they need to be communicated about via several channels – in the app store and within the app, you need education and videos.”

Once wealth managers have mastered mobile security they are then able to press ahead with providing secure communication channels like instant messaging or video chat for clients and advisors. This is an enhancement a small group of global wealth managers have already added to their apps, said Binder, and clearly has great potential to increase client engagement (although also probably great complexity with record-keeping and regulation). Institutions have been exploring biometrics like fingerprints, vein ID or voice recognition to improve security and obviate the need for tiresome passwords for some time now.