While there is agreement that digital decisions are no longer the domain of a few boffins in the engine room and wealth managers predict a surge in demand for chief technology officers at board level, few see this senior talent in place with a mandate to drive change in the next five years.

Only 16 per cent of respondents said that their firms are currently recruiting for a CTO-level role or training up existing staff to provide the digital services HNW clients increasingly expect. Even more telling, roughly half of recipients said that their firms do not even recognise the need to recruit technology leaders or retrain staff.

The survey of over 500 industry executives found that many were admiting that “just keeping up to date with the latest tech innovations is a challenge” and meeting “ever-changing regulatory regimes” was consuming much of their efforts. The report also identified that the biggest skills shortages were in regtech and compliance , artificial intelligence and cyber security . 

Ian Rumens, head of private wealth at Intertrust, said that there is “little doubt we will see more CTOs emerge within wealth management with a clear mandate to drive transformational change.” He said for those struggling to keep up let alone carve out a competitive advantage, it is not if but “when to make those new senior hires."

In a much larger industry sampling two years ago, PriceWaterhouseCooper ranked wealth management as one of the least tech-literate areas in financial services, reporting that satisfaction with relationship managers was on the slide for at least a third of HNW investors -- the finger largely pointed at root and branch digital deficiencies.

Companies that further delay hiring a new CTO with influence at the top table or not hiring at all risk losing out on the best candidates and falling behind industry peers, this latest study suggests.

Intertrust provides administrative services for a host of financial institutions, high net worth individuals and family offices worldwide and said that competition is fierce for technology leaders, especially in high-demand areas such as AI and compliance, and wealth managers should not be complacent.

Although it found that the industry was broadly positive about the value tech brings, it also showed who is leading and lagging, with private equity clearly in the front in hiring C-suite tech talent. More than half in this group said that they were on top of recruiting to manage the transition and were already using AI, blockchain and robotics as part of their digital offering, compared with just 17 per cent performing at the same level in the private wealth sector.

On a positive note, only 15 per cent thought that they were in danger of falling even further behind and 40 per cent believed that they were closing the gap.