Celent explores how client reporting fits into the evolving wealth management delivery channels. Client reporting remains a priority and is viewed predominantly as a means to improving quality of service to clients in both full-service advisory and self-directed service models.

In the report Let’s Get Digital Already: Gearing Up for the Next Stage of Client Reporting Enhancements, Celent presents the evolution of client reporting in the past two years.

Main findings of the report include:

• Digitization has allowed client reporting technology to lend itself to delivery through self-service, hybrid, and full-service advisory.
• Client reporting fulfills wealth managers’ major technology priorities: data management and integrity, and improving the client experience.
• The vendor market is extremely crowded, with a series of players offering various levels of functional coverage within the wealth management platform and client reporting processes.
• Vendors are frequently seeking to differentiate based on their capacity to improve the client experience and on their data management capabilities.
• Digital delivery — interactive client portal and tools that allow advisors to deliver interactive, real-time reports on the fly — are a “must have” for wealth managers to truly harness power of client reporting tools.

“Previously client reporting was seen as a discrete module of a wealth management platform,” says Isabella Fonseca, a research director with Celent’s Wealth Management practice and author of the report. “Today we see client reporting as a distinct and separate module that underlies much of the front to middle and back office functions.”