The websites of leading fund and asset management companies fail to meet the highest standards in user experience and interactivity, suggests a new report from Switzerland’s MyPrivateBanking Research.
The report, for which the firm analyzed and ranked the desktop and mobile websites for retail investors of the world’s top 15 fund managers, finds that the sites, “fail to meet the highest standards in user experience and interactivity,” the independent research firm says in a statement.
The firm assessed the desktop and mobile websites of Amundi, BlackRock, BNP Paribas Investment Partners, BNY Mellon, Capital Group, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, Invesco, JP Morgan, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, TIAA-CREF, UBS, and Vanguard on a total of 60 criteria.
According to the report, many of the evaluated websites don’t satisfy even the basic requirements of an innovative and interactive digital experience. In fact, the quality of the fund managers’ desktop websites ranged from “average to alarmingly weak”, the report says, and that their mobile websites are even worse.
On average, the desktop websites scored only 67% of the possible points in the evaluation. “The majority of fund managers offer no interactive tools to support clients in processing large amounts of complex fund information,” the report says. As a result, the average score in this area is only 33%, it notes.
Mobile sites come off even worse, the report says. In fact, 20% of the biggest firms don’t even have a mobile website for individual clients, the report notes. For the firms that do have mobile sites, only 40% have the capability to provide core content, the report says, and most of them “do not adequately display fund information”.
The fund managers’ mobile efforts leave them far behind other industries, the report says, and it warns firms that the industry isn’t just competing with other traditional fund managers, but also new fintech firms, such as robo-advisors. These new firms “set the bar for digitalization and interactivity on a whole new level,” the report says.
The report also stresses that mobile sites should not simply be scaled down version of firms’ desktop sites. Rather, it says, “established fund managers need to understand that mobile users represent wholly different use cases and should be offered a mobile web presence that addresses these specific needs.”
Additionally, the report suggests that the presentation of fund data “needs to be interactive and attractive”. Interactivity is crucial to attracting users, it says. “The average fund manager must provide more interactive tools such as calculators, demos, games and questionnaires to support financial decision-making,” it says.