CONDÉ NAST AND Deloitte Digital have teamed up to present Digital Acceleration in the Time of COVID, a nine-part series of stories from global business leaders who've charted a path through uncertainty.
Here, Jeanne Andreana, UBS’ Managing Director, Head of Digital Strategy & Platforms shares how a solid foundation in strategy can yield dividends – even (or especially) when best-laid plans go sideways.
It was January 2020 and UBS had every reason to celebrate the New Year. The leading global wealth management firm had closed out a successful 2019 and planned to continue its growth path through digital transformation by working with Deloitte Digital to reinvent its US Wealth Management client experience. The two teams had already created a log of client needs and motivations and were working hard to build their highest priority tools —tools to help increase client engagement.
And then.
Within weeks of the first global lockdowns, 85 percent of UBS’s U.S. workforce had shifted to remote work. This sudden new workplace orientation, along with the high levels of uncertainty felt by people everywhere, meant the firm’s 6,000+ advisors and sales associates would need new tools to connect with their clients. Immediately. This was an unprecedented challenge—a challenge UBS leadership chose to meet with a people-first approach.
Jeanne Andreana, Managing Director, Head of Digital Strategy & Platforms at UBS Wealth Management USA describes these early days: “Every conversation started with, ‘Hey, how are you? How’s the family?’”
“Once we were sure everybody was okay, we got right into it.”
Jeanne Andreana
Managing Director, Head of Digital Strategy & Platforms, UBS
Getting into it meant first connecting with UBS colleagues in Asia and Europe where the pandemic was further along. A pulse of their experiences helped the team quickly identify and implement which security and operational protocols would be necessary for advisors in the Americas to work safely and comfortably from home. Then they focused on providing their colleagues guidance and support. Many were adapting to working with small children at home; how would the firm adapt to non-traditional work hours? How would people log in to the UBS Workspace? How could they do something seemingly simple as printing? And, most importantly, how would they support their clients and the advisors who serve them?
“Wealth management is a relationship-based business,” Andreana says, “and in uncertain markets, our clients need our advisors even more.”
With immediate needs of employees met, and in collaboration with Deloitte, the UBS team was able to pivot and get tactical with the business—fast. In agile fashion, they tapped into the log of client needs and motivations they’d already created and set about reprioritizing. “Anything that made it easier for an advisor to connect with their clients immediately jumped to the top of the list.”
For example, they’d learned that while clients wanted to connect with their financial advisors, they also didn’t want to disrupt focus on weighty matters with less-than-weighty questions. To address this scenario, the digital team rapidly deployed existing technology from another part of the firm to create a scheduler that lets clients see when advisors are free for a quick watercooler chat. Then they set to work on in-app video chats, making real the UBS motto: Clients should always have their advisor in their pocket.
The north star in developing these and all of UBS’s digital tools, Andreana says, is to always create something that enriches the client-advisor relationship, enabling deep, human discussions that move away from the transactional.
“First we ask ourselves what the right experience is. Once the team has zeroed in on the right tool to provide an experience, they ask themselves how it fits with the other tools clients and advisors are already using. How do we make sure that whatever technology we give them is connected in a way that makes sense to them?” Andreana says. “We spend a lot of time working to get that right. Because if you don’t get that right, even if you have the technology capability, it might not resonate.”
Despite development timelines accelerated by the pandemic, the UBS team figured out how to meet client needs by leveraging their own experience and relationships. To great success: client logins soared 26 percent in March 2020 over the previous December, boosting business in a tough quarter and validating UBS’s choice of which tools to tackle first.
The years spent connecting directly with clients—what were they thinking about? what was working? what wasn’t?—proved invaluable. They helped the team create smart, effective solutions quickly and under incredible pressure.
And because of the emphasis on people-driven decisions, client engagement has never been higher. “Our ultra-high net worth clients are now using the UBS Financial Services app all the time,” Andreana notes, “and those who use it most, tend to do more diversified business with UBS.”
The UBS team not only proved their resilience, but also how essential their work is to the firm’s success. Despite a year-plus of uncertainty and disruption, Andreana is upbeat about the future. “From a purely work perspective, it’s such an exciting time to be in digital wealth management. Being digital is how we can differentiate and bring the full breadth of UBS to our clients.”
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