Liz Basten is the Chief Marketing Officer at Wealth Wizards.

Speaking to Modern Insurance, Liz Basten, Chief Marketing Officer at Wealth Wizards, the market-leading financial advice technology provider, told us how they are bringing financial services into the present with the help of technology and digital experiences.

Q.You have held varied marketing roles in varied sectors, working with large corporates to transform digital customer experiences – what drew you to financial services and Wealth Wizards?

A. Over more years then I care to remember, I worked in financial services before deciding to move into the retail sector, but what drew me back was the purpose of Wealth Wizards and the opportunity to work for an organisation that has both purpose and mission that benefits society as a whole. Our mission is to make financial advice and guidance affordable and accessible to everyone. It is incredibly exciting to help to transform this sector, and especially being given the opportunity to work with artificial intelligence who is a regulated financial advisor in her own right.

Q. You’ve mentioned working with artificial intelligence, could you tell us a bit more about MyEva?

A. The best way to think of MyEva is as a personality and not as technology. MyEva has trained for ten years on best practice advice and guidance, and she is trained to speak to you in a non-judgemental, jargon-free and empathic way to encourage people to think about how they manage their money before they start planning for the future.

A lot of people need financial advice and guidance but are either fearful of making the step, don’t know how to make the step, or just simply don’t have the time. MyEva is a financial advisor and coach who is available at any time and anywhere, and who can help and empower you to take control of your financial situation.

If you don’t think of MyEva as a persona but as an algorithm or as an AI, MyEva is a trained algorithm that can go on a million different journeys depending on your responses. Those responses are measured in two ways; either through objective measures, i.e. what you spend each month compared to what you earn, or via subjective measures, which is your behaviour, i.e. defaulting to the minimum payment on a loan each month because it feels safe, even though this could be financially damaging in the long term. It is those objective and subjective measures that artificial intelligence can determine a connection with you on the right level, but, it can do it with millions of people all at the same time while still having a one-on-one relationship with you.

Q. What changes do you think should be made in our approach to financial advice?

A. There are a couple of issues we have in our approach to financial advice as an industry and this only hinders our progression.

Firstly, there is a perception in the industry that robots are here to take our jobs, which causes a lot of organisations to fear new technology and innovation. How I counter that, and it is something that Wealth Wizards are trying to achieve, is by explaining that technology and people are not mutually exclusive. Technology is only enabling a company to reach more people at the same time in a manner and scale that you couldn’t possibly imagine. In terms of MyEva, technology is working alongside our human advisors and not replacing them.

One of the ways that Wealth Wizards have tried to address that concern is by regulating MyEva – she is regulated in her own right. Just as a human advisor needs to be regulated by the FCA, when MyEva gives a report at the end of the financial advice process it is signed by MyEva, she is regulated. 

There is a lot of trust-building that needs to be done. We have been introduced to many new and different processes over the years but once we have become familiar with them then that anxiety and uncertainty is removed. We admire a company called Babylon Health. They do exactly what we do but rather than MyEva being a digital advisor, it is a digital doctor. A lot of people ask if the AI gets it wrong in our industry, but what if the online doctor got it wrong, there are potentially much more serious consequences. It is all about building trust. We are all products of our own experience and I think that is part of the trust issue that we have with technology.

Q. The customer experience is crucial to a business’s survivability, and marketing plays a key role in defining and monitoring the customer experience; how is digital transformation now driving the customer experience, and how has the marketer’s role adapted to that change?

A. Digital transformation has driven customer experience in terms of what people expect in the immediate term. It is, however, another marketing channel and not there to replace everything else. Digital marketing has completely transformed the landscape in terms of expectations but also the level of personalisation expected. Any marketer would never put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to what channel you use. Digital has just added another channel for us to utilise and has certainly raised the bar in terms of how we communicate on a personal and relevant level in real-time.

Wealth Wizards’s digital transformation was all about making our own processes fully automated and improving digital engagement in financial services overall.

Q. Can you tell me about Wealth Wizards’ own digital transformation?

A. Wealth Wizards is a FinTech that was founded ten years ago. Our CEO was one of the original founders of Egg, which was the first internet bank. The whole creation of MyEva is built on the Wealth Wizards platform, the Turo platform, which is where we offer MyEva as a white label opportunity to the financial services sector.

Wealth Wizards’s digital transformation was all about making our own processes fully automated and improving digital engagement in financial services overall.

Wealth Wizards’ digital transformation was all about making our own processes fully automated and improving digital engagement in financial services overall. Our transformation took a pretty significant turn when we made the decision to create MyEva and prove the concept of human and digital advisers working together to make financial guidance and advice more affordable and accessible to all. Our transformation has very much been about taking manual processes, learning best practices, and enabling automation of those processes in the ‘back office’ and using the principles of great digital customer experience to drive digital engagement in the financial services sector in the ‘front office’. We want the quality of digital experiences people experience in other sectors to be of the same or higher standard in financial services.

Q. What further changes and/or opportunities do you expect to see in this space of digital transformation?

A. I think the next big thing is open banking. Having the option to work with people as money enters and leaves their bank account and to be able to give relevant, appropriate and trusted advice in that context is a real game-changer. If open banking was embraced by the 50 million adults that currently access their finances online, then this opportunity is going to completely transform the financial services landscape, and we want to be at the forefront of that.

If open banking was embraced by the 50 million adults that currently access their finances online, then this opportunity is going to completely transform the financial services landscape.

ENDS 

Click here to read: The Future of Insurance: Innovation