Fintech on Friday: Focusing on the customer, not the product, to win back trust

Kelli Keough, JP Morgan

Kelli Keough, head of digital and client solutions at JP Morgan Wealth Management in the US, is prioritising three key dynamics: the changing role of her firm’s 5000 advisers, the needs of clients and the psychology of the relationship between the two.

“The huge area we are focused on right now is our adviser platform,” says Ms Keough, speaking shortly after a typically combative, yet humble performance on a panel discussion about the future of digital wealth management at Monaco’s IMPower Incorporating FundForum summit in May.

“We are sitting with our advisers, watching how they do their jobs, focusing on a couple of the key flows in their everyday tasks, following that through and making sure they have the right information, the right data and the right clickpads.”

This is far from as straightforward as it sounds, says the composed, Northern Idaho-raised banking leader, who worked with high-tech start-ups before establishing her credentials at Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas and JP Morgan in New York.  “We sometimes make it very hard for them to do that. And so being able to organise their day well really requires having tools streamlined for the job they need to do.”

Let’s get digital

These changes have required ruthless culling of legacy systems. Together, with the head of her practice management team, Mollie Colavita, and the wealth management technology team under Ranjit Samra, she has “retired a number of legacy, bespoke and disparate tools”. This includes the 15-year-old Workstation, which has been replaced by a new system, accelerated by the catalytic role of the pandemic in influencing relationships. “As we shifted to a more virtual environment, we’ve introduced digital signatures and virtual meeting tools, helping advisers communicate easily and securely with clients,” says Ms Keough, whose 170-strong team work mainly in product management roles.

While most private banking bosses speak about the major cultural transformation needed to introduce innovative technological tools, she prefers more regular incremental changes, together creating an almost imperceptible revolution in the attitudes and practices of advisers.

“Think about how your iPhone has updates all the time, and they often happen without even asking for them”, she suggests. “Our advisers aren’t necessarily used to that happening in the toolkits they use. What we are trying to do is help them make smaller changes more frequently.”

Central to Ms Keough’s vision is the group philosophy that advisers can no longer exist in a vacuum. In an organisation considered by most to be a product factory, clients must take centre stage in a way JP Morgan was not previously accustomed to.

“We’re laser-focused on customer needs and planning to help deliver the best investing advice and experience, rather than focused on products we want to sell,” she says, insisting that the bank’s reputation belongs to a previous era. “Our advisers start with customer needs and then go through planning to help them decide which products make the most sense for their needs, goals and risk tolerance.”

Balancing the needs of clients and advisers is one of the toughest challenges she faces. “[Ms Keough] keeps a close eye on her two audiences — financial advisers and end-clients of the bank,” says a consultant who has worked closely with her. “This is a tough balancing act of which she is mindful. Digital tools must first be adopted and integrated internally by advisers before end clients can be served.”

Living by numbers

Asked for an example of the new mentality, Ms Keough vividly describes a client-centric application. “We’re trying to let clients interact with advisers on their own terms. We have just rolled out something — for example a meeting scheduler — where a client, who may never have worked with an adviser before, can request a meeting. Then we need to make sure that gets to the right adviser in the right branch at the right time, so that it works for both the client and their adviser. We are really trying to marry what the clients are asking for with what the advisers are seeing and the tools they have so that it works with them.”

Clients’ desire to invest on an ethical basis, she says, has been further fuelled by conversations about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its relevance to client portfolios. JP Morgan Chase’s acquisition of financial technology firm OpenInvest, focused on investing with social and environmental values, is an example of the bank’s work in this space. “OpenInvest will allow clients to make investment decisions that better align with their goals, and it will be a resource for advisers to help clients personalise their investments.”

At the centre of this changing relationship is the wrestling match with data. “It really comes back to starting with the adviser, what it is they want to do and what’s the most impactful,” she ponders. “Large volumes of data can be challenging if you are overwhelmed by it.”

That’s why she has championed viewing data through several “lenses” to enhance both the customers’ and advisers’ relationships with the firm. The deeper the data delves into the psychology and behaviour of her clients, the more important its analysis and impact are at JP Morgan Wealth Management.

“For example, patterns in a customer’s spending or saving can help their adviser recommend the best course of action to help meet that person’s financial goals. Additionally, spending and saving trends across all customers over a longer period can help us identify advisers and markets with future growth opportunities,” says Ms Keough, a former professor of psychology at the University of Austin at Texas, educated at Yale and Stanford.

She left the academic world to apply her theories to the financial services sphere. “Analysing behaviours beyond typical metrics like assets or production helps us to create better tools and resources for our advisers, and better personalise the customer experience,” she says.

Yet, ironically, the further she moves away from her academic training in terms of timescale, the more relevant it is becoming to her day-to-day work. “My background in psychology has taught me that it’s critical we keep our customers at the centre of what we’re doing. We need to design experiences that fit customer needs and help them make better financial decisions. It’s all about putting the customer at the centre, rather than a product. It’s also so important for our advisers to have empathy when advising their customers and always keep the customers’ needs front and centre, so they make better decisions.”

The speed of this transformation will be closely observed by rival players. Not only have most leading senior bankers in the US served a stint at JP Morgan before they sow their seeds elsewhere, but the practices honed in New York will also most likely be rolled out gradually across the private bank’s international footprint. “JP Morgan Wealth Management has made great strides towards winning client trust in the past two years and shedding the image of a distribution factory,” says Amin Rajan, CEO of consultancy Create-Research. “The next two years will reveal the scale of this transformation.”