What do high-net-worth individuals look for in a financial services provider?

It’s fair to say that now is an exciting, if challenging, time for the UK financial services sector. The market is moving at a rapid pace as new technologies and challenger startups arrive on the scene seemingly every day. To retain a competitive edge, service providers need to stay on top of the latest market trends, ensuring they remain responsive to the changing demands of their clients.  

As the number of challenger banks and lenders has increased, the need for providers to offer a high standard of customer service has become vital. This is something we understand intuitively at Butterfield Mortgages Limited (BML), because we exclusively cater to the needs of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs). 

Delving further into this topic, we were keen to discover exactly what were the priorities of HNWIs when it came to choosing a financial provider. To achieve this, BML recently commissioned research among 550 HNWIs based in the UK. The results were enlightening: 78% said the quality of customer care that a business offered was a “key consideration” when choosing a company to work with or buy from.

So, how can service providers keep HNWIs happy? According to BML’s study, almost two-thirds (64%) of HNWIs said they were willing to pay more in fees or even achieve lower returns on an investment if a financial service provider could offer a higher quality of customer care.