Voting with your feet in a digital world!

It looks like 2024 will be ‘Democracy’s biggest year’, a 12-month period in which four billion people – over half of the world's population - will be eligible to vote. In more than 40 countries, ranging from the US, UK, India, Indonesia, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mexico, citizens will be making choices that define the rest of the decade.

However, in a very real way we are making these types of choices every day. In the past decade, consumers have ‘voted’ for everything from Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) payments to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. The ways in which we vote with our feet and finances every single day may seem minor, but collectively they build our world.

Politics today isn’t based on soapbox speeches and leaflets, or even TV ads: it’s increasingly a digital operation with sophisticated use of data, profiling and influencers. The internet means that anyone can be an activist, and political organisations are increasingly digital brands. Their role, online and off, is to get as many people as possible to trust them– to invest in them, if you will. As the percentage of UK adults who own stocks reaches record highs along with the number of voters, the wealth management industry can learn from political parties how to build a brand that people will trust with the most important aspects of their lives.

• Consistency of messaging: One of the biggest sins one can commit in politics is flip-flopping. Although in everyday life people understand that conditions change, so a firm promise made today may not be possible to keep tomorrow, in politics voters will rarely forgive a candidate who changes their policies. Investors will be sophisticated enough to know that you aren’t in control of the markets and there are a host of regulations against over-promising, but you should pay attention to the way that everything from your marketing materials to your face-to-face interactions aren’t making promises that you may need to break.

• Keeping people informed: President Joe Biden (or rather, his social media team) tweets as many as a dozen times a day to thirty-four million followers, holds press conferences, and overall makes sure that whenever something happens his citizens hear it from him first. The people who trust you with their money need just as much reassurance. When major events happen like interest rate changes or the UK slipping into a recession, digital technology offer a valuable channel to contact all of your clients at once, showing them that you understand the situation and are working to protect their money.

• Build a Community: Going door-to-door trying to persuade people to vote for your chosen candidate is still an aspect of modern politics, but as mentioned above, digital media gives people numerous ways to engage that are right for them. Anyone can be an activist for their cause when this means posting a comment on a video or sharing a meme in the family WhatsApp group. In wealth management, this could mean lowering the barriers for entry for information: instead of keeping your analysis of the markets in journals, put them out through your own digital community.

• Understanding your audience: Polling and focus groups are vital in modern politics, and this is true for wealth management. You will have sat down and spoken with clients about their investment goals, but have you gone beyond ‘make my investment grow’? Digital technologies now provide firms with rich data sets that provide a granular view of an individual’s preferences and interests. A deeper understanding of your clients’ sentiments without having to take them to lunch. It is important that your efforts to understand your clients be both reactive and proactive: you can proactively reach out to them for information, but they also need to be able to reach you. You have phones and email, sure, but are there other ways that you can open up to clients?

• Create a blue-chip experience: Everyone knows that in politics, the real work happens at expensive dinners and meet-the-press events. That’s where politicians get the media and business on their side, filling their coffers to buy the digital strategies outlined above. Wealth management has always involved picking up the tab for a client or taking them golfing, but that kind of outreach is hard to scale. Zoom calls to update clients on the market or deliver your new insights can scale to thousands of participants, but hardly deliver a white-glove experience. Running events for investors, current and prospective, on modern technology platforms bridges the gap between the luxury experiences that clients expect and the scalability of digital offerings.

2024 could well turn out to be a pivotal year for global politics, and that will have repercussions in the financial markets. You will need to be able to assure your clients that you will steer their money through any turbulence, but you also need to give them the kind of professional service that they expect. Modern event apps allow this, and for creating the kind of two-way communication that can build trust for them and information for you.