: Kabir Sethi
Title: Head of Digital Wealth Management
Company: Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America Private Bank
Website: www.bankofamerica.com
Kabir Sethi serves as head of Digital Wealth Management for Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America Private Bank. Kabir leads digital wealth strategy & innovation, product management, user experience, portfolio management and digital adoption.
What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Bank of America’s wealth management businesses manage nearly $3 trillion in client balances. As part of Bank of America, these businesses are able to deliver an unparalleled array of financial solutions across banking and wealth through a continuum of wealth platforms: Merrill Edge Self-Directed, Merrill Guided Investing (robo-advised and advisor-led), Merrill Lynch Wealth Management (advisory) and Bank of America Private Bank.
Over the last few years, we have pursued a strategy to transform our wealth management experience across all of our client and advisor-facing platforms, with a focus on delivering a world-class “high tech high touch” model. Our goal is to serve our clients in any way they choose and deliver the personalized experience they expect – whether it’s self-service through mobile check deposits and form signing, real-time virtual collaboration with an advisor or in-person wealth planning consultations.
Core to the strategy has been a focus on combining our enterprise capabilities and platforms with an ecosystem of partnerships with fintech firms. This strategy continues to enable us to deliver best in class solutions across our digital offering – whether purely internally developed or through outside partnerships.
As one of the largest businesses of its kind, with a highly sophisticated array of capabilities and partnerships, we are effectively a vast collection of internally-built and fintech capabilities – organized in a way that delivers the best possible experience to our clients and advisors.
What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?
The strongest validation of our digital strategy was our success in moving 20,000+ personnel to remote work in under seven days during the extraordinary circumstances of March 2020. Clients continued to use digital tools to securely communicate and collaborate with advisors without any impact on quality of service. Advisors and their teams were able to manage their businesses and stay connected with their clients, without any disruption to their practice. For the first time ever, Merrill’s Thundering Herd went fully remote – and continued to operate successfully.
It’s important to note that this success was enabled by focusing on executing a broad-based digital transformation across all our platforms, which gave us the ability to continue serving clients and advisors seamlessly:
- Client facing platforms – Online, mobile, digital collaboration
- Advisor platforms – Through a new Client Engagement Workstation (CEW) – our newly-rolled out browser-based platform with natural language search and virtual assistant capabilities
- Socialize – Our social media platform to enable AI-based content sharing on Linkedin with real-time supervision
- Client Insights – Surfaces relevant client events to our advisors across their clients’ banking, lending, and wealth relationships
Additionally, we have work underway on a number of other core platforms in the areas of digital on-boarding, wealth planning and account maintenance.
How do you feel consumers are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
We have seen wealth clients rapidly migrate to using digital capabilities. In turn, we’ve also seen financial advisors leverage technology to a greater degree.