But things are changing: AI is having a huge impact on capital markets, and client strategy roles won’t be immune to this change.

As experts in AI, the Singletrack team is seeing first-hand how client strategy must change in response to the coming technological upheaval, what client strategy professionals need to succeed in this new environment, and how they can continue to be successful well into the future. Ultimately, the developments we see on the horizon have the potential to save time for client strategy professionals while helping them provide better service to their client base.  

What do client strategy professionals do?

Let’s take a look at the typical responsibilities of client strategy teams. They foster close, productive relationships between sales, research and the buy side in order to maximise revenue through a range of processes, including:

• Day to day client communication

• • • Responding to client enquiries about the firm’s products and services
    • Promoting relevant service opportunities to clients based on their interests, such as analyst meetings and corporate access
    • Driving engagement by identifying and sharing research aligned with clients’ interests

• Optimising client engagement

• • • Understanding client consumption across all accounts and keeping an eye on engagement shifts happening over time
    • Identifying growth opportunities and revenue risks across the client base
    • Understanding how sales and research effort is allocated across client accounts, reallocating resource as required to optimise service
    • Collaborating with technology teams to enhance product offerings such as research portals in line with client feedback

• Defining pricing strategies

• • • Maximising revenue through segmentation, defining distinct products, services and pricing for each type of client

• Responding to regulatory change

• Understanding and responding to regulatory change, including opportunities and risks. The return of joint payments for research and trading commissions is a very recent example

What do client strategy professionals need?

Data: the heart of client strategy

The key to successful client strategy? Having comprehensive, reliable data to back up a deep understanding of all your relationships. But which metrics are most useful for informing strategy and action? Here’s what we recommend keeping track of:

• Investor records and their interests. What are their investment mandates? What research are they receiving? 

• Client consumption metrics. How are clients consuming services? What proportion is written research? Analyst time? Corporate access? Order execution? And how is their consumption changing over time?

• Client profitability. How is account revenue tracking against consumption? What’s the wallet share captured from each client?

Bridging the gap: From data to insight

Of course, capturing data to track these metrics is only half the battle. Once robust data capture practices are in place and a client strategy team has built up their store of internal data, they can undertake data analytics to find insights teams can act on. This will unlock

• Personalised experience for investors based on their historical interests
• Proactive account management based on risk and opportunity signals from changes in engagement over time
• Firm-wide opportunity signals backed up by a holistic, cross-team view of client accounts to reveal consumption gaps, such as clients who frequently consume research but rarely interact with analysts or attend roadshows
• Finely-tuned segmentation and pricing drawn from combining revenue and consumption data, to maximise profitability across client relationships

The problem, of course, is making the leap from the rich client data collected in a firms’ CRM, and actionable, data-backed insights which client strategy and other teams can put into practice in their interactions with clients. 

Historically, finding the resources to undertake this analysis has been a huge challenge, especially for small and mid-sized firms. But it’s not the case anymore. 

AI for client strategy

Today, teams can access AI-backed tools that will help digest data, eliminating low-value repetitive tasks and dramatically reducing the time spent on data analysis for client strategy professionals. That means more time to focus on making decisions and taking actions based on insights, and less time working with the underlying data.

Even where a task can’t yet be completely replaced, AI toolsets can be invaluable by augmenting a talented client strategy professional’s experience and insights, helping them do their job more easily and better.

How will AI change client strategy?

Client strategy professionals will be essential in the AI era, even as the role evolves and changes as new technology develops and adoption spreads. Alongside helping teams save time, these tools will surface new opportunities for top-quality client service.

This table lays out how key client strategy responsibilities are set to change.

Responsibilities	Current approach	What will change?
Identify and undertake high-value activities	Analyse reports and dashboards to direct sales and research teams to higher value activities	Guided actions and agents will proactively nudge sales and research professionals towards high value activities
Prospecting and service optimisation	Analyse wallet share data and market insights for prospecting and service optimisation	AI-backed tools and data analytics will surface actionable insights, freeing up time otherwise spent on data analysis
Spotting opportunities	Review voting feedback to identify servicing opportunities	AI tools to glean behavioural analytics from sources such as portal searches, thenl proactively match intent to services
Client segmentation	Use reporting data drives to undertake annual or bi-annual tiering exercises	Real time segmentation and analysis capabilities will augment or fully replace periodic tiering exercises
Maximising client profitability	Analysing client activities to understand ROI	AI tools will automatically attribute ROI to particular products and services, for example by flagging as a report that led to a monetisable interaction

 

Widespread adoption of AI tools across core capital markets functions and activities is rapidly approaching, and we don’t yet know exactly what the impact will be. But for the moment, the developments we at Singletrack see on the horizon for client strategy professionals will be centred around giving teams more time to spend on actually servicing clients. At Singletrack, we’ll continue to track the development of AI across the capital markets, and we’ll keep you updated through the articles, videos and events delivered by Singletrack Academy.