Are you ready for the "silver tech" opportunity?

Investment letters and market releases were out of date before Covid-19 and will receive a major overhaul as we adjust to the new normal. They remain a necessity to timely inform stakeholders but they can no longer be used as evidence that you have a great relationship or that you are engaging them. Those most likely to read them, from those aged over forty through to our senior citizens, are adapting the fastest to digital solutions through this crisis. Those most risk averse to physical meetings while Covid-19 is with us are also in this age group. The new base line for engagement will include an invitation to join a group virtual meeting or webinar as part of a market release. We have written before why virtual meetings are more inclusive experiences than webinars which you can find at https://forum360.com.au/news-insights/. To deliver within the financial services distribution model, companies and financial service providers should partner with specialised providers to tailor their next-gen solution.

It is logical to expect that the largest growth area for e-commerce, including investment, over the coming years will likely come from catering to those showing a grey hair or two. PayPal calls it "silver tech" and recently reported that people over the age of 50 were their largest growing age cohort through March and April and helped total payment volume thanks to increased purchase size https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/paypal-sees-a-rise-in-older-generations-trying-digital-payments.html. Questmobile reports that 61% of the growth in active mobile users in China this spring were aged over 41. McKinsey's survey of 42 countries finds that consumers expect that the impact of Covid-19 to be long lasting and that 40-60% of those who have adopted low-touch digital 'work-around' solutions intend to keep using them in the new normal. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-global-view-of-how-consumer-behavior-is-changing-amid-covid-19 . The investment due diligence experience in the new normal needs to be safe as well as inclusive - as an aside check out the emergence of livestream commerce in China when you have a moment.

So, the opportunity awaits us to modernise the method by which we engage our stakeholders. How does that work in the financial services ecosystem? A wholesale driven sales model where client confidentiality is core. Will companies host their own meeting as part of a market release, then visit broking houses to run group virtual meetings to the broker's clients? Will fund managers host their quarterly or monthly investor meeting then visit financial advisor groups and private banks for more virtual meetings? This trend is already underway and will likely be the mainstream response yet those who pursue this will find themselves behind the ball on experience, time efficiency and analytics. Why?

• Stakeholders are in complete control of the time they dedicate to a group virtual meeting. They are not going to feel guilty about leaving early. Companies and fund managers need to get to what their stakeholders want to talk about early and the best way to do that is by planning around an agenda set by stakeholders;
• Companies and fund managers can bring people through multiple distribution partners to the one virtual meeting without putting their partner's client confidentiality at risk. Our technology enables this reducing the need for repetitious meetings; and
• Virtual meetings are far more data rich so long as the host controls the data. The Google analytics you receive is just the starting point and specialised solutions have a history of delivering analytics that matter to management teams. Those companies and fund managers that centralise and standardise the collection of this data will yield the benefit of superior feedback and analytics.

Across the distribution channel, from company through to retail shareholder (fund manager through to retirement saver), we have been forced to vertically adapt to virtual meetings. This is structural change and while we all yearn for face to face meetings again, lessons are being learned on how to make our engagement campaigns more effective than they were before. As we return to work there is clear opportunity to pursue silver-tech solutions. Those who try to return to the old ways will miss it.