What we heard at ‘Digital integration in wealth management’ 2025

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a diverse range of pensions, wealth and asset management clients during my eight years at Waracle, and so have a perspective on the types of challenges being faced by my friends and colleagues who I collaborate with on a daily basis.

So it was great, not only to hear that these perspectives are echoed across the industry, but also to understand that we really are helping shape the future of wealth management in close partnership with our clients.

Today, I’ll be reflecting on the most common themes that I heard in conversation with delegates at Arena International’s ‘Digital Integration in Wealth Management’ event held on the 19th & 20th of March this year.

I’m going to make this as easy as possible to read and reflect on, but if it rings true with you and your organisation, make sure to reach out and connect on LinkedIn… here!

Right, let’s get started.

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Theme 1 – The Generational Wealth Shift

There is a pressing concern amongst wealth management organisations that as the individuals they serve change, so will the expectations of standards of service.

The demand for personalised, frictionless digital products and services is stronger than ever within these digitally-native younger generations and many delegates spoke at length about wealth transfer creating challenges for their traditional business models.

As these cohorts become the ‘later-life wealthy’, it is estimated nearly £12 trillion in wealth will transfer from baby boomers to the next generation, so in terms of defending competitive advantage and maintaining & growing AUM, this is a considerable barrier to future success.

The approach to serving these demographics must be underpinned with empathy and should leverage human-centred design to establish what the art-of-the-possible is for the D2C consumer platforms of tomorrow.

Theme 2 – Data Foundations

Many of the delegates who came up to have a chat at our stand were excited about the prospect of an AI-enabled business where repeatable tasks were automated and knowledge work was facilitated and streamlined… but really wanted to chat about their data.

The most common comments were:

• We’re worried about our data quality and therefore the implications of tools trained on untrustworthy data
• We’re at the behest of a siloed data infrastructure, which compartmentalises data and doesn’t give us enough flexibility
• We are spread out across a range of on-prem relational databases, legacy tooling alongside some cloud infrastructure that needs work

We understand these issues, as we’ve seen first hand how legacy systems and processes can impact innovation.

Organisations get weighed down by the scale of the effort, and in an attempt to regain control everything becomes a project with intense processes and procedures to go through before they can release data and figure out the art-of-the-possible.

As they say ‘you can’t eat an elephant whole’, so if data quality, fidelity and accessibility is an issue, addressing solutions in small, focused areas that become the test bed for wider roll out is key.

There won’t be a one-size-fits-all answer here, for some they’ll unify their knowledge and data estate under one vendor, for others a multi-vendor cloud infrastructure might be best… however, the fact are the facts. If you don’t have belief that your data is a high quality business asset, you’ll be building on shaky foundations.

Theme 3 – Whitelabelled Solutions

On to theme number two… Many of the delegates I spoke to were interested in our experience in designing and engineering mobile applications and web platforms.

Across wealth management, many organisations have realised that the quickest route to a client portal or customer facing app is to leverage a white-labelled solution, which can offer short term cost benefits and a quick-paced route to market.

However, many of the delegates we spoke to, opined about lack of UX & UI flexibility, lack of differentiation and the limitations of the solutions.

We are starting to see wealth management clients get laser-focused on what good looks like from an omni-channel, personalised experience point of view and when it comes to the future of wealth experiences, it seems like white-labelled solutions aren’t necessarily offering the value that delegates thought they would.

We are a consultancy forged in the furnace of native mobile applications that leverage the full capability of the internet-enabled, sensor-rich devices that consumers carry around 24/7, so you know where our priorities sit!

Theme 4 – Advisor Solutions

We heard from a range of people across both days that advisors are helping drive consistent growth in AUM, so solutions and tooling for these partners/third parties is at the forefront of many wealth management minds.

One delegate said “If we don’t provide AI solutions that make their jobs easier, better and more seamless, they’ll end up using other AI tools anyway… and we’d much rather de-risk by getting them onboarded onto ours, rather than letting them define their own toolkit from the open market”.

This is the difficulty with the B2B2C space. You want to have some degree of control over how your products and services are sold, but you also want to give talented third parties and partners the opportunity for flexibility and value creation.

We have created a range of advisor solutions for our clients, some incredibly well used, others not-so-much. If nothing else, the investment that you make in advisor solutions shows you are focused on facilitation and efficiency for them… Then get in touch with us to hear our thoughts about where best to focus your investment!

Theme 5 – AI Proof of Concepts

For many of the delegates, AI was the most common conversational topic.

We heard from organisation after organisation about the small scale proof-of-concepts they were testing and rolling out. From operational process optimisation to marketing personalisation, we heard a number of companies talk about their first forays into generative AI.

We also heard about the inertia that is ubiquitous across wealth management both due to analysis paralysis and a lack of comfort with risk.

Our teams have worked on a range of short innovation spikes to prove out the value of LLMs within our client’s businesses. From our experience, understanding the scope and risk inherent in each proof case will allow you to score them and test your hypotheses in the least risky, but highest impact areas.

Theme 6 – The route to AI in production

The last theme from delegates was one which most industries are musing over. How you shift AI proof-of-concepts into production, especially when you operate in highly regulated environments where improper consumer outcomes can mean massive fines and potentially jail time.

This isn’t an easy topic to cover, and I certainly won’t do it justice in a couple of paragraphs. But it is the same question that is driving the FCA to ask executives to come to the table to discuss fair, proper use and the right boundary conditions for a suitable regulatory framework.

We have some great experience in this space, so if you have complex challenges that you need a sounding board for, please reach out.

In conclusion

We had an awesome couple of days at the event.

Thanks to Ben Lane and the team at Arena for making us feel so welcome. We made a ton of new connections and had so many incredible conversations. We can’t wait to follow up and discuss some of the key requirements in more detail.

Thanks for reading!