For wealth management firms, financial advisors tend to be the targets of recruitment efforts. However, in today’s climate, lowering fees and tighter margins are making operational leadership more important than ever.
When hiring a COO or Operations Director, a wealth management background is certainly beneficial. But, to address rising trends and challenges, here are three essential factors to consider when hiring your next operations guru.
1. Technology
Operational leaders must have the acumen to take on the ever-expanding digital landscape. The pandemic sent the evolution of digital services into hyperdrive. Clients have growing digital expectations from as simple as preferring zoom meetings to wanting real-time access to their investment data. From the front office to the C-suite, every aspect of a firm’s business will need to incorporate technology to make the whole business sustainable, let alone profitable. Wealth operation managers need to be fearless and savvy in the face of tech in order for firms to compete with fintech companies, meet client demand and cut down on expensive manual functions.
2. Data
Technology and data go hand in hand. Financial firms are used to tracking and mining financial data. They need to apply the same principles to business operations.
Data-informed decisions are essential to almost every part of a financial firm’s business including client segmentation, marketing, and budgeting. Clients expect more and more personalized service.
In order to customize those services, companies need to collect appropriate data. Operation leaders need to be able to put the right infrastructure in place to collect and use that data to benefit the business.
Considerations include data security, storage, and staff adoption processes. The responsibility of figuring out those data solutions falls on the shoulders of operations leaders.
3. Strategy
A good operations director should always be thinking ahead. They should always be looking out for processes and infrastructure to put into place now in order to meet the demands and obstacles of the future.
The operations team is intimately acquainted with where and how resources are allocated. It’s up to operations leaders to prioritize those resources towards the goals and vision of the company and set them up to succeed.
Operation-minded professionals tend to be very good at the small details. However, it’s also important to know how those details create the bigger picture. The COO is often 2nd in command and needs to be contributing to the vision of the company as well as executing that vision.
Like all industries, the pace of change is happening faster and faster these days. Technology, data-informed decisions, and creative strategic thinking are essential for financial firms to weather any climate. Having strength and wisdom in these areas is key for any new hire in wealth operations.