April 2, 2024

Empowering Digital Onboarding Champions: The Mako Customer Success Journey

Customer onboarding is a critical function of any wealth management operation. To benefit from operational improvements, most firms are now adopting technology that will allow them to modernize and scale their business. Digital onboarding software can bring massive benefits like rapid onboarding, improved data integrity and an enhanced user experience. However, building a fully digital system can be challenging, and achieving success needs the whole company's engagement.

The journey of wealth management onboarding goes beyond a series of forms to be filled out. It is the beginning of your client's journey, conveying who you are and the level of care they can expect from you going forward.

Navigating new processes like digital onboarding can be overwhelming. That’s a big reason why Mako Fintech has a dedicated Customer Success department to help guide you in this process.

The Customer Success team at Mako is your copilot in navigating your digital transformation and ensuring successful adoption once the solution is built. Mako’s CS team offers extensive training programs for all our clients to help them understand our product and digital onboarding as a whole and its impact on wealth management businesses.

This article is based on an interview with Mona Zabet, VP of Customer Success at Mako Fintech. She explains how her team coaches clients and how you can prepare yourself before your digital customer onboarding journey.

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is a core business department that helps customers achieve the desired business outcomes through the use of software. It is an umbrella term that encompasses customer onboarding, education and ongoing support, account management, and proactive counselling on future product usage.

Mako has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. We have the privilege of incorporating our cutting-edge technology with some of the largest institutions in Canada. With this growth, naturally, there emerged a need for a client-focused team dedicated to our clients' success.

Last year, Mako established the Customer Success team to demonstrate our strong commitment to our clients. This team is responsible for our existing Mako clients, specifically focusing on initiatives such as training, onboarding, enablement, enhancements, and managing escalations.

The Mako Process

Your journey at Mako begins with a handoff from Sales to Customer Success. All of our clients are assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager who will be their point person for their entire Mako journey, from signing to implementation and all the way to launch and maintenance.

Mona says the client's success is our success. Our team is judged by key metrics such as usage, retention, and responsiveness. Focusing on usage, if our clients are not using our product, then we are not doing a very good job.

We employ strategies such as training and feedback sessions to ensure our clients are getting the most value out of this product. We help them identify areas of product improvement that will benefit their business. We also advocate for their needs internally to our product and development teams. Essentially, we are the voice of the client and our success is always tied together.

We are incredibly proud of the results we have seen since establishing this dedicated team. We hit record-breaking usage numbers in 2023, saw 100% retention rates since the creation of Customer Success, and have seen a notable increase in client satisfaction.

Supporting Customers Throughout Their Journey

Your advisors must be trained to adequately support their clients as they navigate digital forms. By offering training resources, and marketing materials and helping you prepare your launch, our Customer Success team ensures wealth management offices have the tools and knowledge to offer a superior customer experience.

Mako’s Customer Success team can provide you with key growth metrics such as workflow completion, retention, and growth rates. These statistics will help you measure digital onboarding success, gauge customer satisfaction, and identify areas for expansion and improvement. Below is what Mako client Jessica Smith, Senior Manager of Operations at Designed Securities, had to say about her experience:

“As an early adopter of the Mako platform, the Designed team has used the platform extensively and has been a part of Mako’s growth journey. Admittedly, last year as our usage increased on the platform to meet the tremendous growth of our business, we had some issues as it related to relationship management and getting full value of the platform.

‍Since the introduction of the Customer Success team, however, they have helped us immensely in identifying areas for improvement, managing product enhancements, reducing escalations, and making themselves readily available to our team.

In particular, they advised us on a few changes we should make to our forms and workflows, prefilling certain items and giving advisors and customers alike a truly white-glove experience. Their advice and suggestions have definitely made us use Mako to its full potential"

Driving Success

The digital onboarding journey is a crucial element of customer engagement in the wealth management industry. Advisors must understand and address common challenges faced during this process to provide the best digital onboarding experience.

Mako’s success is intimately tied to the success of our customers; it’s why we love seeing clients grow their business through the use of our software. From a smoother implementation to better training and ongoing product usage tweaks, our customer success team enables everyone’s growth.

To learn more about Mako’s solution and the ways our customer success team can support you, book a demo today.

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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com

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So in my view an appropriately diversified portfolio should have enough exposure to different asset classes, that its able to withstand a wide range of market disruptions. Usually, it’s some kind of negative or positive event… they’ll affect different asset classes differently. So by having your eggs in different baskets you’ll be well insulated from major risk. For example, there’s some kind of change in the housing market… both by having some exposure to it, you won’t miss out on the opportunity to make money. But if it’s something negative, you’re also not going to lose all your money if all of it were in the housing market for example. So at a high level, a properly diversified portfolio should grow in a growing market and yet not be at risk of major losses in a declining market.
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You asked also about an efficiently diversified portfolio, and I would say that that’s a portfolio that achieves those goals with a minimum of different positions. There’s a lot of good reasons to have fewer positions in your portfolio. Being less complex means a portfolio is easier to rebalance and administer. Every time part of your portfolio goes up or down, you're going to need to rebalance it a little to make sure that it stays with the right allocations and the fewer positions you have, the easier it is to do that..the less trading fees you incur doing that.
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There is a tradeoff between being completely diversified and being efficiently diversified. If you were completely diversified then you’d have a proportional segment of absolutely everything you could invest in under the sun, like shares of palm oil futures or something like that. I don’t think everyone should have palm oil futures in their portfolio but I’m not a wealth manager. I think it comes down to your portfolio and how large it is (probably the Canada Pension Plan has a proportion of palm oil futures in it). You’re going to have to talk to your advisor and choose a degree of complexity that’s right for your portfolio.
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CN: Let’s just take a step back - what does a typical portfolio look like and has that changed over time?
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RB: Yeah, so I'm not entirely sure what a typical portfolio looks like these days because it's actually changed quite a lot over time. I think common wisdom used to be that the classic balanced portfolio was 60% public stocks and 40% bonds. These days that's ancient history. Most would say that the bond allocation should be a lot lower these days in this age of unprecedented low-interest rates. These days it’s the stock portfolio that’s been driving a lot of the growth. I think a well-diversified portfolio in the modern era should absolutely include exposure to all kinds of alternative assets (that aren't even really that alternative but still kind of fall out of that traditional bucket). So you know I mentioned real estate, private companies, maybe for example commodities or other types of investments. So I think that there are a lot of things that you can invest in and your advisor can guide you on what’s appropriate for you.
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CN: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Talking about alternative investments, we’ve heard a lot this year about ESGs, impact investing, alternative investments… do you think there’s more of an appetite today for these types of investments than in the last ten years?
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RB: Yeah that’s a topic that’s close to my heart having previously started an impact investment company. It’s definitely been a gigantic increase in interest. I think when I started my previous company we were speaking to large wealth managers and having them say “we’re barely getting a grip on early ideas.” Like not including gun manufacturers or tobacco companies, and now these same companies are launching impact portfolios and marketing this aggressively. So there’s definitely been a seat change, it’s a real industry, and there’s a lot of studies out there and data showing that ESG or impact investing can equal or outperform non-impact investments. So I think it’s a huge part of the market these days. That said, one of the things that’s driving it is people’s interest in it. I think that one of the stories of the investment industry has been the personalization of it. People’s portfolios are being tailored to their own needs and circumstances. Impact investing is definitely a piece of that. People are environmentalists, but an institution is not an environmentalist. It doesn’t live and breathe the impact on the environment the way an individual does. The person who is active in the David Suzuki Foundation for example is going to be active as an impact investor and it’s appropriate for them to be.

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That’s a great question. I think there's a lot of advantages and you gain a lot with an automated platform. For me, it's a lot easier to manage. I have some of my money in one of these platforms and I barely think about it. It's being rebalanced all the time. The costs are much lower in terms of expense ratio for the same kind of rebalancing. Again you're missing a lot with that, but on just the mechanical portfolio rebalancing you're getting a great deal there. I would say that two other advantages are up-to-the-minute reporting, so you always have that login where you can see your position, see how your portfolio is doing historically. And finally, this is an advantage for me and anyone who doesn't love doing taxes, but typically they’ll take care of your tax forms for you, and end up with much simpler tax forms, so it kind of works out what your cost basis was and how much you have to report.
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CN: So let's talk about the other side of the coin then...what are the risks of not having a seasoned professional managing your money?
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RB: I wouldn’t exactly phrase the question that way. You know it's more what’s the benefits of having a real wealth manager? Some of the clients of robo advisory firms may not even be aware that they're missing out. A wealth manager isn't just balancing your stocks and bonds, that's kind of the very lowest mechanical level of what you get out of the wealth manager. Really they're your advisor on your life. Intimately intertwined with you because you're thinking about retirement planning, on planning for college for your kids, when is the right time to buy a house, and when should you get life insurance, for example. An advisor can help you with all of those decisions and they can connect you with service providers like a mortgage broker when you may be in need of one. So I think that you get a lot of value out of having one of these advisers, particularly when you get to a stage in life when these kinds of services are more about the long-term and your life circumstances are far more critical.
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CN: There are clearly pros and cons and two sides of the story depending on who you're asking. Like you said, what stage of their life they’re in ...but do you think the platforms that we’re seeing emerging like to Qtrade, Wealthsimple, and all the rest will ever become status quo?
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RB: Yeah, I do actually. I think that similarly to how you know we’re using online platforms to automate everything for us (I can’t think of the last time I used to travel for example), everything you’re going to be trying to do with your money is going to be automated, and it’s going to be appropriate to be handled by one of these one of these platforms. In particular, for most people at an early stage in their lives that have few assets to manage, not a lot of complexity, not a very extended personal family circumstance, it’s gonna make a lot of sense to have a low fee robo worry about it. But at some point their life circumstances are going to get more complex and you’re gonna get married, or maybe you’re not, or you may have other objectives that you may want some advice on and at that point it may make sense to either supplement the robo advisory portion of your portfolio, or graduate to a more holistic wealth management view.
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CN: Thank you so much Raph, these answers were great. It’s always insightful chatting with you so thanks for sharing those answers with us today.
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RB: It’s my pleasure.

Mako Fintech Team

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