More than 20 years ago, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane famously applied “sabermetrics”, or baseball-specific statistical analysis, to his player evaluation and decision-making process.
Beane used statistics to uncover hidden trends and better evaluate players. He then acquired undervalued players whose potential for success was overlooked by other teams.
Despite having one of the smallest salary budgets in Major League Baseball, The A’s experienced both regular-season and post-season success. In fact, in 2002, the A’s achieved a 20-game winning streak, the longest such stretch in Major League Baseball in 100 years.
Beane’s use of sabermetrics forever changed baseball, and forward-thinking leaders like him are similarly using data and business intelligence to change industry after industry.
Business intelligence and wealth management
Technology has come a long way since the A’s record-setting streak ended. Now much of the analysis that Beane and his team of managers did manually happens automatically. This is all thanks to the advent of business intelligence software programs.
Business intelligence programs capture, analyze, and then visualize data. The goal is to derive better answers to key questions and empower employees and business leaders to make better decisions.
Because they are automated, business intelligence programs are much faster than manual data crunching and more accurate because they reduce the possibility of human error.
Focusing on intelligence allows managers to become like detectives, uncovering previously unknown data relationships.
A Billy Beane figure has yet to emerge in wealth management. The industry is conservative and slow to change – a lot of money is at risk after all. Furthermore, existing models for investing and managing wealth meet minimum expectations.
Long-term, the hands-off “set it and forget it” approach to investments and assets will grow wealth.
But the question is whether you could be managing your clients’ wealth even more effectively, either by making them more money or reducing unnecessary risk—or both.
The answer is yes.
How business intelligence helps wealth managers grow investments
While existing human-based strategies are relatively dependable, potential improvements exist that managers could make with the added information from data and business intelligence. And it could result in a better client experience overall.
Data and business intelligence programs might:
- Identify actionable trends before a human wealth manager notices them, helping clients take advantage of market upswings and limit their exposure to downturns.
- Help wealth managers and their clients avoid emotional decision making.
- Help managers more easily identify portfolios that are at-risk or need more handholding and steer them toward safe and profitable decisions.
The applications and opportunities are almost endless. Any growth-minded wealth manager is going to want to scale with business intelligence on their side.
The future for wealth management is now
Sure, there might be some resistance to change in wealth management, but no more than there was in baseball 20 years ago.
Eventually, some early-adopting innovator is going to disrupt the industry and lead the way toward a future with solutions that are tailored for each client, toward conversations that are more meaningful, and toward decisions that are based on hard evidence.
In fact, the software already exists to transform the industry.
Cheetah is a comprehensive, cloud-based trust accounting and wealth management platform built with unparalleled business intelligence capabilities. Combined, Insights and Query Builder form the business intelligence solution within the Cheetah suite.
Insights processes and analyzes your data to produce a vast array of visualizations that cover metrics critical to your business. Each view shows multiple widgets that work together so that as you explore different scenarios (variables) they adjust with each other to provide different perspectives of the same data.
Query Builder is a data inquiry tool within Insights that allows any user to extract raw data from their Cheetah wealth management system. Pull up-to-date portfolio information, track new accounts, review administrative workloads, analyze revenue streams, and monitor trends within your portfolio.
The better and more informed your decision making, the more likely you are to stay ahead of the competition and keep your business on the path to achieving its goals.
If you work in wealth management, there’s no reason you can’t be the industry’s Billy Beane. We can’t promise that someone will make a movie and cast Brad Pitt to represent you. Nonetheless, we can assure you that you will be better prepared to manage your clients’ wealth more effectively.
Now is the time to embrace the future.
To learn more about how to make that happen, request a demo today.
Getting to know Shane Pond: Insights from a Cheetah Solutions Consultant
Before joining Cheetah, Shane led a trust company’s transition to modern technology—a process that introduced him to Cheetah and eventually inspired him to join the team.
