Social distancing measures and working from home enforced by the coronavirus pandemic have brought out greater team spirit and dedication among wealth managers, while new digital channels of communication are proving effective in helping clients navigate these testing times.
These are precious takeaways from the crisis, and need to be “repackaged” and put to work for when the healthcare emergency is over, believes Penny Lovell, CEO Private Wealth at Sanlam UK, the wealth management business section of the South Africa-headquartered international financial services company.
“The crisis has brought us together as a team,” says Ms Lovell, whose bubbly personality comes across clearly on the phone. “There is a certain new energy and camaraderie now and I am finding that we are a lot faster with our ideas, our brainstorming and our communication to clients.”
Ms Lovell joined Sanlam in late 2017 from Close Brothers Asset Management, where she was private client head, brought onboard to build up the firm’s Private Office for UHNW individuals, families, charities and trusts. In 2019, she was appointed CEO of the wider Private Wealth division, the discretionary business which manages £4bn ($5bn) of Sanlam’s total £13bn of assets in the UK, and has 33 portfolio managers and 4,800 clients.
Staying in touch
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak and working from home model, she has put in place a number of initiatives across all of the teams, with “emergency planning measures” including transforming her triweekly morning meetings with portfolio managers into an 8.45am daily virtual meeting. This brings together the CIO, portfolio managers, research analysts, distribution and marketing teams, “to keep everybody informed and supported”.
“I am trying to make sure every avenue that links back to the client is covered in our morning meeting, so we really are all singing off the same hymn sheet. Communication is better now with all of the different business areas, and we are understanding each other better than we have ever had,” says Ms Lovell.
She encourages everyone in her team to have an open debate and ask questions, and describes an episode when a veteran portfolio manager supported a younger colleague on how best to deal with an anxious client who was on the verge of liquidating their whole portfolio.
While most of the firm’s clients are staying calm in these turbulent times, life cycle and professional background, rather than gender, affect the way they are reacting to current violent market falls and volatility spikes. Their communication preferences are also emerging more clearly.
For elderly and vulnerable clients, the priority is to stay healthy and safe, and having already lived through past crises, they tend to trust portfolio managers to manage their wealth. They appreciate having a chat with their portfolio manager, mainly to talk about personal issues around their wills and wellbeing of children and grandchildren. “There are still a lot of direct client telephone calls going on, and that’s as important to get a feel for how the client is, and to listen to what is actually going on in their lives.”
Individuals close to retirement are “slightly more on edge, need more handholding and support from financial planners”. Professionals in their 30s or 40s, those with significant financial experience, or those who are knowledgeable and passionate about the world’s economy and current environment, are the most demanding and involved. Some of them are already planning to get back into markets, drip feeding or investing lump sums, which reflects a certain “mood of optimism” among the firm’s mostly UK-centric client base.
Tech acceleration
The crisis has certainly accelerated the firm’s technology transformation programme over the past month. All portfolio managers now are able to communicate with clients through video conferencing, while the client portal allows clients to check and monitor the value of their portfolio, and access documents electronically.
But what Ms Lovell is most proud of are her new client webinars. The most recent quarterly investment client lunch was converted into a webinar at short notice and, to make sure that clients still felt they were having lunch all together, she sent them a caring and joyful email offering an online M&S food voucher.
“I try and do anything just to have a bit of humour and lightness,” she says, reporting that the gesture was really appreciated by her clients, and that more clients participated in that live investment webinar than have ever turned up for one of their sit-down lunches.
More importantly, they asked “extraordinary, highly technical and thoughtful questions” covering not only financial markets but also political and economic issues, making it a very interactive process.
However, the crisis has also highlighted some difficulties in communicating with certain clients, in particularly the elderly, who sometimes do not even have an email account.
“That is the big challenge for us, the generation of people who won’t have emails or mobile phones and prefer to have document in paper format or be contacted on landline. I would love, after this journey that we have all been on, to be able to know that we can all communicate online really effortlessly,” she says. “It is up to us to being more understanding of our clients why they don’t want to do it or what stops them from doing it.”
Injecting fun
While working to streamline compliance and improve the use of technology, Ms Lovell is also about to launch a series of client events “to support health and wealth”, which will be rolled out over the coming weeks. She has already been quizzing colleagues about the work they have been doing recently, not just to help each other but also to support their communities in difficult times such as this.
Ms Lovell also wants to make sure that during the crisis sophisticated clients, in particular, continue to have access to a team of experts, including lawyers, trustees, investment managers and financial planners. It is “dangerous” for a big client to just have one adviser as their main point of contact. “We need to think of some fun good technology ideas that bring us together,” she says, recalling how valuable business networking events are in wealth management.
She ventures that in a few weeks she will have probably mapped out all of the different client adviser and client groups, setting out new ways of communicating and digital events, which may, for example, include video wine tastings. A gallery expert may talk online about a client’s art collection, while financial planners may be invited to give online talks on financial wealth, or to discuss how to support children as they go to university.
The crisis is triggering a lot of soul searching and providing new ideas. “Every day, at the moment, I am asking myself ‘what are we going to take away from this, what are we going to learn, what are we going to do differently, and what are the opportunities for our clients to have a much better service and access to us’. I have found new team groupings that work better together and I have learned a lot better about my team skill sets,” she reveals.
Also, she has realised that clients really value “a touch of humanity” and want to have a relationship with wealth managers. “We have always been probably quite formal as an industry as to how we communicate with our clients, whereas I find people really enjoy chatting,” she adds, explaining that lately she has been doing “lots of random calls” to clients herself “just to check in”.
When the crisis is over, Ms Lovell wants to continue to push the firm’s digitalisation transformation, but is adamant she wants to keep the enhanced human element. “Everybody loves technology, and being able to view portfolios online, webinars and so on” she says. “But the client facing element, even if that’s just telephone calls, is as important.”
