Like many in the industry, we experienced explosive digital adoption during the COVID 19 crisis. However, it‘s important to note that we were already experiencing strong growth in digital adoption prior to the crisis across almost every metric – driven by our earlier investments in digital transformation.
As a result, we have seen engagement accelerate across each of our platforms:
- 77% of Merrill clients are actively using our digital platforms (MyMerrill or the Merrill Mobile App)
- Digital logins are up 79% compared to the previous year
- 40% of forms are being signed electronically, up from less than 10% last year
- Over 40% of checks are now being deposited by clients using their Merrill Mobile app (up from 25% last year)
Simply put, we have seen a level of digital adoption in the last few months that we had expected would take 5 to 6 years. This has largely been enabled by the fact that we already had the capabilities in place going into the current environment.
It’s also striking that we’re seeing this migration to digital across all age groups – this is not behavior that we are only seeing among younger clients, which indicates a broad-based shift in the way clients and advisors are interacting in the world of wealth management.