The way in which consolidated client reporting is offered should not be determined solely by the segment in which a client falls, and to do so may be detrimental to the relationship, experts said at a recent WealthBriefing panel held in Switzerland.

The value of a client report depends upon its simplicity and the customisability for clients, and should be built as such from the bottom up to tailor to investor demands, it was suggested at a recent panel event, held at Zurich’s Park Hyatt Hotel in association with SS&C Advent and hosted by this news service.

With older generations becoming more tech-savvy, it is not as easy for firms to anticipate what clients will want in terms of reporting by age, as they may have done previously, it was said.

In the view of Steffen Binder, managing director and co-founder of MyPrivateBanking Research, as reporting preferences become ever more diverse and complex, wealth managers should be focusing the delivery of their reporting on convenience. As Binder sees it, “people are lazy with regards to looking at that kind of information”, and as such this portfolio information has to be presented in a user-friendly format.

Binder highlighted the importance of ease of access to mobile capabilities, with smartphone and tablet delivery increasingly high priority, in addition to email and client portal delivery. And, with investors now used to accessing information instantly “from the palm of their hand”, Binder stressed that the real-time delivery of data is a must-have.

The manner in which reports are presented must be adapted, Binder added. “The way that people want to perceive data is strongly shifting to graphical and pictorial ways,” he said. This has been an integral element in the development of new robo-advisory platforms, he added.

Demand for consolidated reporting is unsurprisingly most pronounced in the US, which is typically ahead on technological developments, with Asia following close behind. Here, Jason Ulrich, managing director of discretionary portfolio management at UBP, pointed to the larger amount of custodians that HNW individuals tend to have in place in Asia.

Looking specifically at Switzerland, the leader of Deloitte’s banking transformation practice, Hugh Macquarrie, observed how the Alpine state has had weighty regulatory challenges to deal with, meaning that “discretionary spend around client reporting and also around digital has been constrained".

However, while firms may now be turning their attention to enhanced reporting and specifically consolidated report, Ulrich stressed the need for brevity: “Whether you have a full-page report or a 100-page report, often I’ve seen that when you go into client meetings, you look at the start value, the end value and performance. That is what counts at the end of the day.” It is walking the client through the transactions and how investment decisions have affected the portfolio that helps build rapport, he added.

Consolidated reports not only reduce the amount of time clients must spend poring over portfolio information across their providers, but with the correct technology in place, the headache of manual data aggregation for wealth managers can also be alleviated, SS&C Advent’s Paul Bebber said.

“You’ve got access to all of this data and you’ve got to somehow get to it, and I think that needs to be in an automated way,” he said.

The ability to see a client’s wealth in the round can also help strengthen relationships, Ulrich added. “You can give holistic advice and performance reviews, so you can assess the performance with other banks, analyse the data and get a recommendation out of it,” he said. “You can also get cost management control, or you can do it for compliance monitoring purposes. The report is the basis of steps to follow on later.”

This sentiment was echoed by Macquarrie. He said: “What we’re seeing is the most sophisticated advisors are taking that information and running the portfolio through checking portfolio compliance with strategies overnight, highlighting any issues – like variance, for example – and sending an automated email to the wealth manager saying that ‘This is something you might want to talk to the client about and here’s our proposed strategy to get the portfolio back into the range of the risk appetite that the client has set’. It’s really about taking consolidated reporting and making something out of it rather than it being just an end point in itself.”

The future of client reporting comes down to four key components, in the eyes of the panellists: simplicity, timeliness, accuracy and flexibility.

However, facilitating a true through-view so that clients can compare the performance of all their assets across the various institutions they are working with may present fresh challenges, it was observed. Nor should it be assumed that clients would necessarily want this level of disclosure of their overall wealth – and what they are doing with it. These considerations, and other nuances presented by consolidated reporting, will be addressed in the second part of this feature on Monday.