REMAPPING THE CLIENT JOURNEY
By Yael Alpert, Head User Experience and Design for Aladdin & Scott Roen, Head of Client Experience Platform for Aladdin
The more tech changes, the more client expectations do, too. New digital experiences—across everything from consumer retail to enterprise tech—continue to reshape nearly every aspect of our lives. Investment management is no exception.
The key to navigating those changes? Anticipating your clients’ expectations.
For firms to grow and innovate, leaders should be attuned to the client journey. How it’s evolved, what the pain points are, and how firms can better cater to their clients’ needs. From the perspective of a COO or CTO, an environment for seamless collaboration—and true interconnectivity—are top of mind.
What does that entail?
Think of the user experience as less of a journey and more of a choose-your-own adventure. Clients are accustomed to being able to access their workspace from anywhere and to work collaboratively. Rather than moving from one stage of a journey to the next, effective platforms seek to provide a connected ecosystem for various roles and functionalities to exist together, fostering co-creation and collective, fluid workflows.AI-powered tools are enabling that experience—reducing friction and lowering barriers. The technology’s ability to lower technical barriers, such as expertise in coding or design, enables cross-team collaborative workspaces that act as a blank canvas.Beyond the user journey itself, clients are seeking more value from their services, in the form of insights, analysis, and intelligent nudges. The ability to access an investment management platform and get a clear view of: what does my portfolio look like? What are the factors and changes I need to be aware of? How can I leverage that knowledge to find new opportunities?
ALADDIN INNOVATIONS Client experience is central to Aladdin’s ethos. That means we consistently tap into client needs, challenges, and aspirations—and rethink our approach as those trends shift.
In 2023, we created the Aladdin Client Experience Team to build and foster stronger connections, bring best practices to the fore, and solicit meaningful feedback—throughout the broader Aladdin® community.
We continue to build upon our existing integrated eFront® and Aladdin® Whole Portfolio Solution capabilities across public and private asset classes, enabling institutional investors to spend less time reconciling systems and aligning datasets, and more time deriving insights and driving outcomes.
Meanwhile, Aladdin Studio is giving clients a more direct way to interact with Aladdin’s data and workflows.
In 2023, we enhanced our risk analytics and performance capabilities across public and private assets, introducing total portfolio time-weighted return and private asset money-weighted return metrics, as well as seamless integration to BlackRock’s proprietary Factor Risk models spanning private equity, infrastructure, and real estate to provide investors with a view of economic risk placing alternatives on a comparable basis with a portfolio’s public market assets.
The Aladdin® platform is also evolving to help private credit investors—providing data, tools, and workflows for investing up and down the credit spectrum.
What’s more, client-centric solutions (Aladdin Academies, real-time market and geopolitical perspectives, and new GenAI capabilities) are helping users assess their portfolios quickly and effectively.
That ability of the technology to be smart and responsible—to be responsive to client inquiries—will be key to creating a competitive edge, from our vantage point.Increasingly, clients will expect the platforms and services they use to proactively streamline their day-to-day. Think of a CFO who needs analytics reported in a particular format, or with visual representation of the data. Or an executive who needs to understand the details of the sales pipeline.Over the next few years, the client journey will transform into a unified experience, with tech humming in the background, invisibly facilitating new workflows, enhanced customization, elevated analytics, and greater automation. Firms that prioritize creating a more frictionless way of working will be better positioned to leverage new tools and continue to grow.
