Amy Janses is the Senior Vice President for Wealth Production Management at Johnson Financial Group. Her first step towards the financial services industry was in an operational role, and later moved into the product management space within wealth management. She leads the product team for the wealth management business at Johnson Financial Group. She works on leading a transformational project for the company consolidating custodians. Her role includes identifying the right system or tool to use for consolidating and eliminating redundancies to really just make the business more efficient to be able to grow more rapidly in the future.
What are the current challenges that are plaguing the wealth management industry on a daily basis?
Some of the day-to-day challenges in the wealth management industry include the implementation of technology that we rely upon to provide services to our clients. With technology constantly evolving, it becomes difficult for clients to enter similar information into multiple systems. We make use of the swivel chair concept, to make the process easier. One of the challenges and biggest opportunities we have is eliminating the redundancy, and working on integrating systems to provide efficient services to clients. It enables our advisors to spend more time to be able to deliver services and products faster. There are lots of opportunities to continue to use technology in the best way.
Could you elaborate some of the technologies that you are currently using or which are prevailing in the market today that are reducing redundancies?
During our recent business transformation, we identified and partnered with enterprises that leveraged open architecture. The open architecture enabled the use of API’s to transfer data from one system to another and communicate with multiple organizations at once. The seamless exchange of files, between the two organizations on a daily basis, helped keep things in sync. We place a large emphasis on identifying systems and vendors who are open to newer platforms, and who already have received some traction on integrating several systems. With vendors open to integration, we can start having conversations with them to make the integration efficient. In the wealth management industry some companies are adapting to the digital revolution faster than others. More importantly, transformation is about making sure you’re identifying the right partners, who are amenable to helping with the desired integration.
"We focus on better understanding the client and their goals for the assets that they have accumulated, to help them achieve success"
How do you manage customer relations in your organization’s practices, or operations?
Over the past couple of years we have changed our approach toward client engagement. We focus on creating a better relationship with clients, while understanding their goals for the assets they have accumulated, and the impact these assets have on the company and their clients. We’ve started to take this very concentrated effort on just listening, asking open ended questions, and trying to acknowledge the needs of our clients. The better you understand their hopes, dreams, and wishes, the more impact you can have on them. In such a situation, investment performance becomes less of an issue and investment management and money management become major factors. We found that asking open-ended questions and understanding the customer better, uncovers the opportunity us to create a positive impact for our clients as well as our business. As we start to dip our toes more and more into, we’re certainly witnessing much more success. Our client’s needs being met by all the services that we have to offer.
Do you have any advice for your peers or industry leaders that are in the wealth management space?
Knowing your clients and their requirements in addition tokeeping a pulse on the market developments is paramount. It is important transform your offerings to make them relevant to the customers. The leadershipqualities, and courage to ask hard but relevant questions to understand the changes that you need to make yourself and to your organization continue to be relevant. With that, come the difficulties of a transformational journey. People have to be accustomed to change. While moving forward towards change, you have to be thinking about the longevity and the sustainability of the business. The process might be difficult for some people while =undergoing transformation. Pushing through the struggles and the roadblocks that come along the way will make your business flourish in the market.
