Overview
Asset & Wealth Management + Competitive Intelligence
In the post-pandemic era, the magnitude of challenges has increased manifold across industries. The level of competition has reached a new high and sustaining the same profitability margin and growth has become difficult to achieve. Strategies that have been successful in the past become redundant in no time amid fast-changing investor preferences and industry disruptions. Business strategies must constantly evolve and adjust to this dynamic market environment and competitor moves. In such a fast-evolving challenging marketplace, a well-oiled MICI function becomes critical to success.
MICI can help AWM firms to make more accurate business decisions, stay on top of potential competitor threats, tap into new opportunities, and identify blind spots. It can help them answer many questions like their position in the market, their clients and demands, who the competing firms are and what strategies they are formulating to attract new customers, improve profitability, enhance the value proposition, and differentiate their offerings. Answers to these questions can help AWM firms alter existing strategies or develop new plans to achieve their goals.
Asset & Wealth Management
Key Measurable Benefits That Can Be Achieved Through MICI:
1
Agility and resilience by always having a bird’s-eye view of the target market and its nuances.
2
Establish meaningful benchmarks and goals to help businesses succeed.
3
Strong brand positioning, value proposition, and offering by gaining competitive advantage and staying ahead of the value curve.
4
Better business decisions based on a comprehensive and detailed overview of the market, competitors, customers, and specific buyer personas to strategize, tap opportunities, and mitigate risks.
5
More success in product/service launches that are based on intelligence with reduced time-to-market.
6
Customer-centric approach and transforming the customer experience through more profound insights and personalization.
7
Measurable business benefits like improvement in productivity, efficiencies, data quality, and increase in cost savings.
Asset & Wealth Management
The Whole Spectrum of Activities Involved in Market and Competitive Analysis
A comprehensive market and competitive analysis require a holistic view of the overall market conditions, consumer behaviors, and competitive strategies and developments. It involves three key phases, as highlighted below:
Step 1: Understand the Market and your Competitors
The most important part of operating a business is understanding your industry and the market you serve. This refers to identifying the competition, the opportunity to grow (organically and inorganically), and your target client or customer base. Moreover, identifying the target market segments helps create and launch effective campaigns to increase revenue/sales.
Step 2: Analyzing the Data Captured on the Market & Competitors
The next step is to analyze the data, discover answers to the initial research questions and convert those answers into strategies. This process begins by organizing the data and analyzing what products your competitors offer, what are their sales tactics and results, their pricing strategies, marketing of products, content strategies, level of customer engagement, social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms usage, etc. and finally your value proposition.
Market Analysis & Intelligence
Understand the market dynamics and stay abreast on new developments to discover new business opportunities. Developing a deeper understating of your market segment by learning and assessing the potential impact of upcoming industry trends, tech disruptions, product innovations, and regulations.
Competitive & Product Intelligence
Exploit your competitors’ weaknesses and learn from their strengths to create a robust business strategy and differentiate your product offerings. Developing an in-depth understanding of competitors’ business and product strategy, conducting product benchmarking to identify gaps in offerings, and framing a more effective business and product pricing, performance & distribution strategy.
Brand Strategy
Frame an effective branding strategy to set yourself apart from the competition and create a brand that is distinctive and compelling. Creating a holistic view of your competitors’ branding strategy to understand their brand positioning / messaging / awareness / differentiation / focus. Gather intel on how they build trust, improve stability, simplify choice, and create pricing power through branding.
Marketing Strategy
Frame a measurable and impactful marketing strategy to stand out from the competition. Conducting a marketing-driven strategic competitive assessment to identify opportunity gaps in marketing channels, messaging, or audience targeting for key products/initiatives.
Data Collection
Where Can We Find Data or Gather Intel for MICI?
Data relevant to MICI can be gathered from various sources. For example, businesses can actively and passively collect this data to evaluate their brand, market share, competitor developments, products and services, strengthen business strategies, operations, technology, industry best practices and benchmarks, key industry trends, etc.
The information captured from multiple sources must be interlinked and weaved together to provide actionable insights. The key sources to gather this information can primarily be the following:
- Industry resources
- Industry reports from associations, consulting companies, etc.
- AWM specific paid and free databases
- Online and offline conferences
- News portals
- Analyst reports and call transcripts
- Online surveys, polls, blogs, third party reviews, online communities, etc.
- Social media
- Company resources
- Company websites
- Company news releases
- Annual and quarterly reports
- Social profiles
- Interviews or calls with management, other thought leadership releases and other corporate announcements
- Internal intelligence platformsSeveral firms have in-house intelligence platforms (such as SharePoint-based platforms) that are knowledge management platforms capable of storing large volumes of content. However, these platforms lack structured intelligence that enables strategy, product, sales, and distribution teams.
- Limited information on market and competitors, lack of historical data, access to defined set of sources, etc.
- Inability to offer actionable insights on a timely basis
- Are not agile to cope with/respond to rapidly shifting market dynamics
- Lack of integration with other workflows and existing architecture
- Primary research: sources to capture direct and focused intelligence:
- Focus Groups
- Interviews
- A/B Tests
- Events
- Social Media Interactions
Step 3: Acting on Market and Competitive Analysis Results
The final step is to act upon the findings of the analysis. Adding regular market and competitive analyses to your sales and marketing process and adapting your corporate strategy based on this analysis will positively impact conversions and always help you stay one step ahead of the competition.
Key to Success
Competitive Intelligence Platforms Are a Critical Lever for MICI Teams to Succeed
To stay ahead of the curve, it is pertinent for Asset & Wealth Management firms to have a technology solution at the forefront to drive actionable insights from abundant unstructured data. It’s equally important to ensure that the digital solution aligns with the strategic priorities of multiple functions and holistically provides intelligence. Digitizing the intelligence function needs to evolve from simply creating a central knowledge repository to accessing a platform that offers a holistic view and turns thoughts and data into action. Asset & Wealth Management firms struggle to find the right platform to meet these requirements. One of our platforms, Insightsfirst, a market and competitive intelligence platform backed by internal and external data, domain experts, and actionable templates, helps address these challenges.
To know further, please visit Insightsfirst for Professional Services.
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