According to a recent McKinsey study on banks, the client side of the banking business is six times more valuable that the balance sheet provision side. There is a lot of talk about big data. The big lever might be your clients’ small data.
Today, a race is on in the financial space. FinTech wealth management startups are investing heavily to capture the value that comes with owning the client. Traditional banks are fighting this development by establishing their own platforms.
Banking on the next bubble to burst for this challenge to go away has not worked in the past. At least not after the first internet bubble of the late nineties. Owning the client made Amazon the world’s biggest retailer within two decades. Ask bookshops what happened to them. Or traditional department stores.
Boutique asset managers are faced with what appears to be a dilemma: Either rack up their fixed cost base by building in-house business development capabilities to organically grow their asset base, or gain assets by joining a wealth management platform or third-party marketer and give away or share the precious client relationship.