The Hidden Cost of High-Touch Client Service in Wealth and Asset Management
Premium client service in wealth and asset management has always come at a premium internal cost. Long-tenured relationship managers, bespoke reporting, tailored proposals, RFP responses written from scratch each time. The service feels spotless to the client because the firm absorbs the complexity behind it.
Today, however, the economics are becoming more difficult to sustain. The cost of delivering highly personalised service is rising faster than the revenue many firms generate from each client relationship. Margins are under pressure. Expectations around responsiveness continue to increase. Clients judge their experience against every digital interaction they have, and that’s not just limited to those within financial services.
Florian Padberg, Head of Client-Facing Technology at Pictet Asset Management, discussed this pain on Salesforce’s Spotlight Podcast.
“Clients appreciate the service we offer them through our sales, client servicing and marketing teams… the efforts to do that are still too high.”
The service is valuable. Clients recognise that value. The challenge lies in the amount of effort required to produce it. That gap is where strategic risk begins to emerge.
Before you can reduce that effort, though, it helps to see that it isn’t all the same effort. Not every hour of client service is worth the same to the client. Some of it is invisible admin they’d happily never think about. Some of it is the visible, human attention that makes them feel understood. The mistake firms make is treating both as equally worth reducing, when one should disappear and the other should be protected at almost any cost.
Where the effort hides
Most firms underestimate the cost of client service because no single department owns it.
The effort is distributed across the organisation and rarely appears as a single line item on a P&L.
Relationship managers spend hours updating records after meetings instead of preparing for the next client conversation. Proposal teams recreate answers that already exist somewhere else in the business because previous responses were never structured or shared effectively. Marketing teams build variations of reports that have already been produced multiple times. Sales and client services ask clients the same questions during onboarding because important context failed to move through the process.
None of these activities appears significant on its own.
Together, they consume thousands of hours each year.
None of it does anything for the client’s sense of trust. A client never feels more valued because the paperwork took longer. This is the admin category, and it can be automated hard, because the client never experiences it directly.
The same challenge appears within sales teams.
“Our sales teams spend probably too much time today doing work which is not directly related to selling and to facing clients.”
This remains one of the largest sources of untapped value across wealth and asset management.
Many of the people responsible for generating revenue and strengthening client relationships spend a significant portion of their week on administrative and coordination tasks. The cost extends beyond lost hours. Every internal process creates an opportunity cost: conversations that never happened, follow-ups that arrived late, or opportunities that reached a competitor first.
The real trap is letting the admin crowd out the attention. Every hour a relationship manager spends rebuilding a proposal or updating a record is an hour not spent on the kind of effort clients actually notice. That trade-off is the true cost hiding inside high-touch service.
🎙️ Hear the full conversation
Florian Padberg joined Salesforce’s Spotlight Podcast to talk through how Pictet Asset Management is rethinking the client journey for the age of AI. A proud moment to see a Ziipline client featured on the series.
Why high-touch is getting harder, not easier
Three industry-wide trends are increasing the cost of delivering a high-touch client experience.
1. Client expectation
Institutional and high-net-worth clients compare their experiences across industries.
Fast responses, personalised communications and relevant recommendations are increasingly viewed as standard expectations. Delays, generic content and fragmented interactions create friction in ways that would have been tolerated a decade ago.
2. Global coverage
Many firms now serve clients through teams spread across regions and functions.
A single client relationship may involve sales, client servicing, marketing and investment specialists across multiple markets. Coordinating those interactions becomes significantly more complex as organisations grow.
Without shared visibility, clients experience the firm as a collection of individuals rather than a connected organisation.
3. The knowledge gap
The most valuable information in wealth and asset management often comes from conversations, yet almost none of it is structured.
The strategies a client is interested in, the regulatory constraints they are working within, the question they asked at the end of the last call, all of it tends to live in the relationship manager’s head. When that person moves on, the knowledge moves with them.
When relationship knowledge depends on individual memory, continuity becomes vulnerable. People change roles, move firms or retire. Valuable context often disappears with them.
This is where technology, like Salesforce can make a meaningful difference.
“We want to keep the human touch, and especially in our business the relationship with the client will always remain very important. But by increasing the capture and analysis of the data we have available, we should take the right conclusions and make our engagement more impactful.”
The objective is to equip client-facing teams with better information, reduce administrative friction and ensure valuable knowledge remains accessible across the organisation.
What leading firms are doing differently
Organisations making progress tend to focus on four areas simultaneously.
1. Creating a connected client journey
Many firms still manage RFPs, onboarding, servicing, reporting and marketing engagement across separate systems.
As those processes become more disconnected, the effort required to coordinate them increases.
Pictet’s focus is to bring more of those interactions together.
“We have reviewed our RFP processes recently. We are thinking of adding some onboarding parts that are not in Salesforce today into the system to really have a holistic view of the journey.”
A connected view of the client reduces duplication, improves collaboration and gives teams greater visibility throughout the relationship lifecycle. The client never experiences that visibility directly, which is precisely why it’s safe to automate hard.
2. Capturing insight from conversations
Client conversations generate valuable information, yet much of it never reaches a structured system.
AI is beginning to help address this challenge.
Meeting notes can be summarised automatically. Follow-up actions can be identified and assigned. Previous interactions can be surfaced before upcoming meetings.
The relationship manager remains central to the client experience, but far less time is spent on administrative tasks surrounding each interaction.
3. Knowing which moments to protect
The harder judgement is knowing where visible human effort has to stay, because there are moments where a client is watching closely for signs of whether the relationship is genuine or transactional. The behavioural research on service, such as Ryan Buell’s work on the “labour illusion”, points the same way: effort should be hidden where it’s purely functional and made visible where it’s meant to reassure.
Market stress is the clearest example. When performance is difficult, an automated update, however well-timed, reads as the firm running a script. A short personal call from the relationship manager signals that someone specifically thought about this client’s situation.
Life events sit in the same category. A death, a divorce, a business sale, a child starting school, retirement. These are the moments clients pay closest attention to whether they’re being treated as a person or a case number, and a generic triggered message costs more trust than it saves time.
Problem resolution belongs here too. A fast automated deflection can feel worse than a slower, visibly human response, even when the automated route resolves the issue sooner on paper. Clients trust a process more when they can see a person working on it.
A periodic review meeting is where the two categories meet. When a relationship manager recalls a detail from eight months ago without checking their notes, it reads as attentiveness. The technology becomes invisible support behind a visible act of care.
4. Treating change management as a strategic priority
Technology programmes succeed or fail based on adoption.
Executive sponsorship matters, but sustainable change requires ongoing communication, training and engagement across the business.
As Florian explained:
“It is change management at the end of the day. We have a strong executive commitment to move in that direction. But we also try to provide context, and we probably don’t do that enough.”
The firms that get this right find pathfinders inside the organisation, demonstrate value through quick wins, share those wins broadly, and reskill in parallel with the technology rollout. The firms that get it wrong buy the platform, train people once, and wonder a year later why adoption is patchy.
The commercial case behind the experience case
Client experience is often discussed as a service objective.
It is equally a commercial objective.
Every asset manager will experience periods where investment performance becomes more challenging. During those periods, relationship quality becomes increasingly important.
Clients who trust their provider, feel understood and receive consistent value are more likely to maintain long-term relationships.
Florian highlighted this reality during the discussion.
“We are in an industry where in times of difficulties in financial performance of our financial products, clients can relatively easily move away from us. If we create this superior client experience and have a deep relationship with them, it is really an argument for them to stay and stay with us in the long run.”
Viewed through that lens, investments in client experience support both growth and retention.
Stronger relationships create resilience. They help firms retain assets through market cycles and reduce the commercial impact of short-term performance fluctuations.
The long-term value of retaining a client often exceeds the cost of the systems and operating model improvements that support that relationship.
The metric most firms are not measuring
Most wealth and asset managers can tell you their cost-to-income ratio, net new money, AUM growth and investment performance.
Far fewer can explain how much internal effort is required to deliver and maintain their client experience. Fewer still can tell you how much of their relationship managers’ time goes into admin versus attention, or which client moments are being automated that shouldn’t be.
That visibility is becoming increasingly important.
- How long does it take to respond to an RFP? And does the answer still feel bespoke to the client receiving it, or does it read as something assembled from a template?
- How much time do relationship managers spend with clients compared to internal administration? And of that client-facing time, which moments carry weight?
- How quickly does client insight move between teams?
- How consistent is the experience across regions and business units?
The answers reveal far more about the future scalability of a firm’s client model than many traditional operational metrics.
Technology plays an important role in addressing these challenges, but the bigger question concerns operating model design.
The firms creating lasting advantage are finding ways to deliver increasingly personalised experiences without proportionally increasing the effort required behind the scenes.
Florian’s vision for the future captures that outcome well.
“Hopefully internally it would be less effort to provide the same or even a better level, and a more tailored and personalised experience. The client should feel that our company knows them even better than before, and can propose solutions rather than selling financial products.”
That is the opportunity facing wealth and asset management firms today.
Deeper client relationships. Better use of institutional knowledge. More time spent creating value and less time managing process.
The firms that solve that equation will be best positioned to compete in an environment where client expectations continue to rise and differentiation becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The firms creating the greatest advantage today are finding ways to deepen client relationships without increasing the effort required to maintain them.
→ See How Pictet Is Using Agentforce
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