Now is a time for informed business planning
Volatile investment markets have increased the risk that macro movements cut asset managers’ revenues.
But like ships in a storm, asset managers have no choice but to navigate the peaks and troughs. As a result, now more than ever is a time for informed and flexible business planning – not for guesswork.
So, if you are involved in planning for 2023, you will need the best information and frequent updates in case you need to adjust your direction. In Part 1 of this blog series on the ROI of BI, we present the asset management Behavioral Benchmark as the most cost-effective business intelligence on the market.
Your BI is your SatNav
Almost every minute of every day, someone in your company is making a decision that will contribute to the future course your company will take. Some choices are big and some small, but they all combine to drive your company’s direction.
A good decision can make all the difference, for example, choosing which RFPs merit the money and effort needed to respond.
How will you decide?
- Perhaps you will consider your latest RFP success rate, whether it differs by asset class or client type, and whether responding might create an opportunity cost elsewhere.
- Or maybe you will remember what you did last time, add some ‘gut instinct’, and cross your fingers as you either go for the RFP or not.
We all make some decisions without basing them on good information. They are just less informed.
However, if you were on a ship in a storm, how comfortable would you be if the navigator ignored the SatNav in favour of gut instinct and crossed fingers? It is the same inside asset management firms, just less wet.
Cost-effective business intelligence
BI is information about yesterday and today that you use to make decisions about tomorrow. But what makes one piece of BI more effective than another? The textbook answer is that the ‘best practice’ is timely, accurate, valuable, and actionable.
In Part 2 of this blog series, we will demonstrate how the Behavioral Benchmark pays for itself by giving early warning of issues relating to fundamental client behaviors like buying, staying, and buying more.
For now, though, we will establish the benchmark’s credentials as an effective BI tool by comparing its features against the textbook characteristics of ‘best practice’.
| Best practice BI | Features of the Behavioral Benchmark | Benefit to you |
|---|---|---|
| Accurate | ✓ A central taxonomy of best practice metrics ensures consistent calculation. | - Pull the Helix© taxonomy off the shelf and start measuring immediately. - Facilitates the adoption of a ‘measurement culture’. - Assurance that peer-group comparisons are like-for-like. |
| ✓ Select the leading and lagging indicators that reflect your strategy. | - Articulate your strategy in terms of the measurable behaviors you aim to stimulate in your clients. - Align (and re-align) your measurements with your goals. |
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| ✓ Independent data quality checks identify errors. | - Only clean data enters the benchmark. - Gain confidence in your data. |
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| Timely | ✓ Quarterly. | - Frequent enough to help you see trends and adjust accordingly. - Not so often that measuring precludes getting work done. |
| Valuable | ✓ End-to-end client journeys. | See your effect on your clients’ behavior. |
| ✓ Clients – institutional & intermediary relationships. | - Adjust your business plan to behavioral differences between segments. |
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| ✓ Markets - the Americas, EMEA, & Apac. | Align with regional differences in client behavior & industry-wide norms. | |
| ✓ Competitors (anonymized). | Compare against your peers at a point in time – average, highest, & lowest. | |
| ✓ User Group membership | - Peer-group discussions are fuelled by consistently gathered data. - Explore best practices in a safe environment. - Shape the benchmark’s future. |
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| ✓ Every metric has its own time series. | - See trends over time. - Forecast your future effect on client behavior. - Explore relationships between metrics. |
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| Actionable | ✓ Bespoke dashboard and visualisations. | If you like the effect you had on clients, keep going or do more. If not, change. |
| ✓ Independent observations and hypotheses. | We will draw attention to any areas that stand out – for good or bad. | |
| ✓ Being used to solve real-world problems. | ROI examples we will expand on in Part 2: - Converting external endorsements into sales. - Increasing sales conversion rates. - Stop the spread of client retention issues. - Reduce the net cost of sale. |
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| ✓ Explore the data yourself. | Perform your own analytics on our Power BI platform. | |
| ✓ Feed behavioral benchmark data into your BI system. | Aggregating behavioral data with the rest of your BI will further strengthen your decision-making. |
Many decisions are trade-offs
Whether you base your decisions on science or instinct, they will often be trade-offs between the costs and benefits of different options. And because resources are limited, our decisions involve allocating them to the choice we expect to be the most cost-effective.
For example, these are some of the hypotheses we are developing in the Behavioral Benchmark:
- Buying – is there a correlation between event attendance and sales conversion?
- Staying – what is the relationship between meeting volumes and client retention, once you have excluded investment performance?
- Buying more – what are the leading behavioral indicators that an existing client may be considering buying an additional product from you
Can your current business intelligence do this?
Can you afford not to join the Behavioral Benchmark?
With a growing number of asset managers measuring and comparing their ability to get clients to buy, stay, and buy again, can you afford to be left behind?
Are the costs justifiable? In the words of one asset manager, “it paid for itself many times over by giving us early warning of sales and client retention issues.”
Designed by asset managers for asset managers, we believe the Behavioral Benchmark is the most cost-effective business intelligence on the market and the perfect SatNav for ships in a storm.
