Profiles in Technology Adoption
A large private bank approached Red Rock with a concern regarding their new financial planning software. After a year plus of implementation efforts and millions of dollars in expense, adoption was minimal at best. The bank wanted to drive greater adoption of the planning software.
Reframing the Challenge
After preliminary interviews with executive leadership team, regional management, private bankers, and private client advisors it became clear there was resistance to adoption of the planning tool. This resistance was expressed in several ways:
Technology training to that point had been minimal. Bankers and advisors were hesitant to present an output to their clients they were not fully confident in.
The key metric being tracked was number of plans delivered. The bank needed to focus on the process of planning from both an internal and a client perspective, not just the document being delivered.
Guiding Principles of the Engagement
Once the challenge was understood, several guiding principles were designed to begin engagement with the private bankers and private client advisors:
Communicating the importance of planning from the client’s perspective (the why) needed to be better aligned with the value story of the bank.
An expansion of back-office resources was necessary to support a shift to a planning-centric culture.
Greater team coordination was needed to allow for client-facing team members to serve clients comprehensively and fluidly.
Executive Commitment
Once the guiding principles were established, the executive leadership team in partnership with Red Rock committed to:
Secure the resources and funding needed to deliver 2 day, in-person regional development sessions focused on both the planning-centric client sales and service model (the why) and the technical competency to drive planning software usage (the how).
Secure the resources and funding to create a back-office support team dedicated to planning support.
Design an operating model that allowed for private client teams to deliver a unified client experience.
Line of Business Execution
A 9-month program was designed and delivered to 15 private bank regions which included:
Intensive, 2 day, in-person regional development sessions with monthly virtual follow up. Red Rock facilitated first day the sales and service model guidance; the third-party technology provider facilitated the second day technical training.
Designed and delivered a formal process for private client team client engagement. Collaboration meetings and strategic opportunity reviews being at the forefront of the new process.
Designed and delivered a more formalized client segmentation and needs assessment process to determine if clients and prospects are a fit for the new planning process.
End Results
Over the course of the 9-month program more than 600 new clients were onboarded to the planning platform. The average revenue for clients using the planning platform increased significantly.
