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Got Lots of Money to Monitor? Sorry, There's No App For That

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Blue Nile, in just the last week, sold:

·         A $20,000, 2-carat engagement ring via the iPad

·         A $6,000 diamond eternity band via the iPhone

·         One-carat total weight diamond tennis bracelet, $2,650 via the Blackberry.

It’s not just Blue Nile, of course. The Gilt Group, which boasts of its own iPad app sale of a vintage Rolex watch for $24,000, notes that that its iPad order values tend to be 30% higher than on their website or iPhone application, according to the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org, an experience that seems to be replicated with other retailers.

A Sidetrack About the Amazon Phone

Such purchases, as an aside, will be the reason why an Amazon phone will probably be another grand success. Amazon will roll out a mid-range Android phone, Azita Arvani of the Arvani Group speculates. It won’t be anything that special, and it probably wont make that much money on digital content, at least money that it couldn’t make from its already-released Kindle Fire. And in some cases, such as videos, people will be less inclined to purchase the content for a phone, she says.

Buying Amazon products, however, would bring an interesting twist to the business model.

“Amazon might be viewing its tablet and phone hardware just as different ways of carrying and viewing an Amazon catalog,” Arvani said.

Where are the Personal Wealth Management Apps?

So, this is what we know:  We like to shop from our devices, so much so that Amazon may be willing to bet on another loss-leader of a device based on the trend. Not only do we like to shop, but some of us really like to shop. To the tune of $20K plus.

What we don’t know is why the one sector that would most benefit from this trend – personal wealth management – has been reluctant to go mobile.

As it happens, this appears to finally be changing, but the clear reluctance of these firms to offer their clients mobile apps says a lot about how luxury brands perceive the online world – a perception that is beginning to be proven wrong.

Dragging Their Feet for a While

The lack of PWF mobile apps was pointed out in the New York Times a few weeks ago, but it is something that has been apparent for quite a while.

This past summer, MyPrivateBanking, reported that only half of the world’s 30 top banks and wealth managers offered mobile applications for their clients.

None of the banks, it said, offered a comprehensive mobile application with real time access to the client´s portfolio, financial research and specific mobile functionalities such as financial planning tools with the capability of being personalized by the client.

Granted, there are a lot of financial and security regulations such institutions must follow before they are able to offer such a service. That, however, is doable: after all, retail investors – the Wal-Mart and Macy’s shoppers of the financial service world – have such offerings, albeit these too have rolled out relatively late. Citigroup, for instance, this past summer launched an iPad app for this group.

The New York Times provided a clue about this reluctance in its article: Wealth managers, it said, cited such concerns including “a general impression that private banking clients did not want that kind of relationship with their bankers.”

Now, it seems, the bankers realize they were wrong. The Times cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers Asia Pacific Private Banking Survey 2011, which reported that nearly 50 percent of private banks expected to use mobile technologies over the next few years to interact with their clients.

More to the point, days after the Times article ran, UBS Wealth Management Americas announced a mobile technology strategy to help its 6,000 financial advisors engage with their clients. It’s not quite an app, based on the description – think, rather, a tablet tricked out with specialized software and protected client data that a FA can use when he or she visits a client. Still, it’s a start.

What Took Them So Long?

Luxury brands in general seem to have all fallen in the same trap – that is, the idea that their rich customers would not want to hob nob online with the hoi polloi.

Hence the somew

 

Image via CrunchBase

hat schizophrenic approach to social media of a lot of these companies. They’ve only recently, with a few exceptions, launched Facebook pages and even, then they are keeping their brands arms’ length from, well, everybody:  before Facebook changes its rules, one in five of the 100 global luxury brands would not allow fans to post on their Facebook Walls, according to L2.

The Burberry Experience

There have been some exceptions, my favorite being Burberry, which has pushed the envelop with such experiments as an interactive campaign for one collection last year.

Now, we recently hear from the brand that after it transitioned most of its marketing to digital, it enjoyed a 29% increase in revenue. I can only image that UBS and other wealth management shops are hearing similar reports.