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WealthTech
Views Report Using technology to improve the management of investment portfolios December 2020
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Version 1.1
Welcome 2020 is going to be seen by many as one of the most turbulent years in their lifetime. The impact of Covid-19 that started in early 2020 continues to wreak havoc on most industries throughout the world, impacting not only economic output but disrupting political establishments too. Within this backdrop, managing wealth for both the short and long term has probably never been more complex and hazardous, as the on-going turmoil in sectors affected by Covid-19 (which is most of them apart from software and key services), means wealth is being eroded or destroyed in record time as businesses require substantial amounts of capital to keep operational until normal trading can resume. In addition to this, due to the on-going monetary stimulus from governments around the world, we are now living in a historically low interest rate environment which is causing the wealth management sector to have to re-think the traditional Model portfolio construction method as it is deemed not fit for purpose anymore given the low returns now offered on bonds. So how do wealth managers respond to these significant issues? There is clearly not one silver bullet however it is apparent that the use of technology can help, a lot. From the on-going feedback from participants in the sector it is clear that there are still a large numbers of wealth management firms relying too heavily on spreadsheets to manage and monitor their investments. And of those that have invested in technology, the tools they have can be potentially focused on the wrong areas, be potentially too complex for their needs, or not being used properly across their organisation to achieve the best results for their clients and their business. In our first report on technology that helps wealth managers improve the management of their investment portfolios we have insights from a range of technology companies from Europe and the US that cover different aspects of this large topic, such as digitalisation tools for client engagement and portfolio construction to enable better personalisation and scalable growth, tax reporting tools to bolster investor returns, data analytics to help investors make better buy and sell decisions, and technology to enable a holistic view of all investments, both public and private. As with our other WealthTech Views reports we will look to add more participants over the next 4-6 months so the report includes as many areas as possible so it is a useful resource for wealth managers seeking solutions for this crucial business need.
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Interactive PDF Click on page arrows and buttons below to jump to relevant section
Contents Introduction
Etops
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4-7
Finantix
Finlight
8-11
13-16
SEI
SIX
Tindeco
Trendrating
Our Services
Investor Connect Service
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Our Report Programme
Our Business Needs
22-25
17-20
34-36
26-30
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This WealthTech Views Report: Using technology to improve the management of investment portfolios, includes the views from seven solution providers and thought leaders from across the globe, with participants from the UK, US, Switzerland and Luxembourg. To enable each thought leader to present their views on this particular area of the market and highlight how their solutions can help wealth management firms achieve their objective of managing investment portfolios more effectively and efficiently by using technology, we asked each of them the following two main questions; 1. MARKET: What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are using technology to improve the management of investment portfolios? What are they doing well, what are the challenges and what areas could be improved? 2. SOLUTION: What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better? As you will read as you go through the report, the solution providers contributing to this report are tackling a range of issues in this area however the key themes from their responses are as follows: The wealth management sector still has a large number of participants that are still relying on Excel spreadsheets to manage their investments and provide a consolidated view of their positions. This creates not only inefficiencies in processes and potential job dissatisfaction, but also increases dramatically the chance for errors and slows down quick decision-making. The exponential increase in information sources means making investment decisions is getting harder. It is therefore important to be able to cut through the noise and understand fully what drives stock prices to be able to make better buy and sell decisions. Although investment returns are driven primarily by the underlying performance of the asset invested in, investor returns can be increased if tax is managed in a more efficient way. Constructing investment portfolios for clients in a way that suits their individual needs is a challenge as current business models mean providing bespoke services can be unprofitable. Technology can now be used to enable the scalable customisation of investment portfolio construction. Technology can be used to reduce the administrative burden placed on front office staff so more time can be spent providing the best service possible to their clients, something that is considered critical to client retention and can be seen as more important than investment performance. We hope you enjoy reading the report and look forward to hearing your thoughts. If you are a solution provider in this space and would like to feature in any of the updates, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Simon Ramery
Stephen Wall
Co-founder & Director
Co-Founder & Head of Marketplace
Email: simon@thewealthmosaic.com
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Email: stephen@thewealthmosaic.com
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1. Introducing Etops AG Key business facts: Founded 2010 HQ Address Bahnhofstrasse 1 8852 Altendorf Switzerland Company Size 51-200 employees Website www.etops.ch Regional Presence Western Europe
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Company overview
Thought leader
Etops is active along the entire value chain of wealth managers. This includes services, technology and consulting. Etops offers outsourced services for all back and mid-office tasks. Interfaces based on a unique machine-learning parser technology developed by Etops, which reads and processes bank statements and booking confirmations, ensures a high proportion of custodian bank coverage and processing of data with very low error rates. This creates an ideal environment for flexible multi-bank setups in all reporting and data visualization areas as well as for wealth management platforms.
Pius Stucki, CEO and founder of Etops AG
On this basis, Etops offers portfolio management solutions for wealth and asset managers, pension funds and family offices, as well as comprehensive reporting and dashboard solutions for all types of banks. Each Etops solution and implementation is supported by experienced consultants both in IT and in the business context. The range of products includes both standard software and tailor-made solutions. Etops also offers SaaS-based platforms enabling smaller market participants to access stateof-the-art technology at a competitive price and to cover all compliance requirements. Etops currently serves more than 41 clients with over CHF 42 billons of assets under reporting.
Email: info@etops.ch Pius Stucki has broad experience in product management and information systems for the asset management industry. Having worked with Swiss banks and family offices for a number of years, he has built up extensive experience with operations and software solutions for asset managers, family offices, pension funds and private banks. As a former professional athlete Pius still loves to compete successfully in running and cycling events.
Christian Jedlicka, Principal consultant at Etops AG Email: info@etops.ch After several years in securities and derivatives trading and fund management, Christian Jedlicka successfully switched to the software and service sector in Austria and Switzerland in consulting and management positions. He has extensive experience in the field of software solutions and digitization projects for the financial industry, with a focus on wealth management and private banking.
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*Q&A Pius Stucki & Christian Jedlicka What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios? What are they doing well, what are the challenges, and what areas could be improved?
not only deal with traditional financial market data, but also consider and interpret figures from the sustainability sector. Companies such as Etops, with their many years of experience, help to consolidate, analyse and visualize the extensive data material.
has therefore become a common term in the financial industry and wealth managers need to understand new key measures such as footprint values, megatrend exposures and climate impact. This will require additional data and new visualization approaches.
From our perspective, there are currently three key factors that have a major impact on wealth management: The need for further digitalization, the need to address sustainability issues and the continuing increase in regulatory measures.
Regulation
Which leads to another essential aspect: data and its analysis. The quantity of data already available today is enormous and growing, not only through the data generated from new areas such as the sustainability environment mentioned above, but also through the inclusion and analysis of unstructured data. This requires further improvements in data management and data visualization. Modern data science helps to understand and use the data efficiently and in the future wealth managers will be able to use machine learning to recommend investment solutions based on the behaviour of their clients over a certain period, and to identify and approach potential new clients. We are therefore witnessing a structural change taking place in the clientele of wealth managers because the wealth created by generations from the precomputer age is being passed on to digital native heirs. Modern wealth management must therefore meet the expectations of the younger generations in order to remain competitive.
Increased digitalization Experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has taught most companies that digitalization must be emphasised even more in the future. This also holds true for the wealth and asset management industry, which has been rather hesitant to take steps in this direction. For too long, the focus has been on core areas such as the modernisation of reporting, for example, while neglecting such essential areas as fully digitalised workflows (e.g. in the area of customer onboarding). In this respect, it will no longer be possible in the future to rely exclusively on the services offered by custodian banks. We believe the megatrend of digitalization will now also gain momentum in the financial sector.
Sustainability The climate debate has clearly revealed that people around the globe are becoming more aware of sustainability issues. Numerous events and media reports, as well as appropriate financial products, clearly show that the financial industry is also prepared to adapt to this change and to provide investors with the best possible support in consciously orienting their investments towards sustainability. For the future, it will be important that asset management solutions
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MiFID II, FIDLEG, AML. There is a long and growing list of regulations the financial industry has to deal with and this list will certainly not get any smaller in the foreseeable future. Modern technology is helping the wealth management industry not only to cope with this challenge, but to turn it into an opportunity. Swiss wealth managers are currently facing official regulations for the first time, which in many cases require modernization of their technical setup and thus create the opportunity to optimize internal processes while at the same time strengthening customer service.
The opportunities The trend towards digitalization offers new perspectives for wealth management. Not only fully digitalized onboarding with e-signatures and automated generation of contract and banking documents, but also modern communication technologies enable enhanced and efficient customer interaction. This is additionally supported by personalized reports and analyses. State-of-the-art data visualization offers investors as end customers permanent access to their assets with all necessary data and analyses, even on all mobile devices. The trend towards sustainability enables wealth and asset managers to attract new client segments and provides an improved basis for successful discussions with future generations of heirs of their clients. ESG
Wealth managers need to be aware that today their clients have their own access to an unmatched flow of data from a variety of sources that provide them with information about what is happening in the global markets. But this represents a challenge for wealth management professionals as they are expected to keep on top of the global market data and extract the relevant information to develop appropriate investment proposals. Modern technology, supported by automated data analysis and selflearning algorithms, can help portfolio managers and relationship managers concentrate on their actual
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*Q&A Pius Stucki & Christian Jedlicka tasks and provide the basis for robust investment proposals. The data also provides the foundation for personalized marketing activities and comprehensive attractive customer reports. In this dynamic environment, driven by social change and new regulations, wealth managers must therefore develop a clearly defined strategy, supported by reliable and holistic data and the right tools to succeed in a changing market. Although the trend towards digitalisation in the financial sector has led to new developments in many areas of the banking sector for some years now, independent asset managers are still lagging far behind. The level of digitalisation is still low and there is still potential for improving efficiency and increasing the attractiveness of the offerings. Admittedly, the pressure of declining margins in recent years has prevented many from making the necessary investment in this area however new platform-based offerings, such as those from Etops, allow cost-effective entry into stateof-the-art technology and thus increase competitiveness while meeting all compliance requirements. It is essential for wealth managers today to meet the increasing demands of the new client generation, the regulatory challenges, and emerging trends such as the sustainability aspects, with state-of-the-art technological solutions, without the need to invest substantial funds on new software and systems. The bottom line for wealth management is that SaaS-based platforms will remain the megatrend of the industry for years to come.
What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better? Based on a mix of services, technology and consulting, Etops offers solutions which cover the entire value chain of wealth managers. This includes solutions for lead
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generation and client lifecycle management, mid and back office services, custodian bank interfaces for multibank setups, proven portfolio management systems, compliance and sophisticated reporting solutions for all purposes and state-of-the-art data visualization concepts. SaaS-based platforms are gaining popularity in the area of independent wealth managers, enabling smaller companies to access state-of-the-art technology at a competitive price and to cover all compliance requirements. Etops currently builds platforms for wealth managers located in Switzerland and Liechtenstein which are offering FIDLEG compliant onboarding processes (with e-signatures), combined with a flexible portfolio management system that has all the necessary functionality to ensure the compliance with the new regulations. Etops also offers state-of-the-art tools for managing clients. Etops can offer a range of services such as the implementation and configuration of flexible onboarding solutions, including the population of contracts and e-signatures, to tools supporting the whole client lifecycle management, and the identification and acquisition of new clients. Etops’ solutions not only enable wealth managers to create modern attractive reports but also build fully digitalized approaches, with direct access for the end clients via web browsers and mobile devices including smart phones. The generation of digital natives will ask for access to their portfolios and will expect clear and attractive user interfaces. Etops provides the technology and the knowhow which allows the wealth managers to grant their clients access to all their assets, anywhere, anytime.
Etops also provides wealth managers with all the tools necessary to cope with the regulatory requirements and to offer the end clients consolidated views on their wealth both in the traditional PDF format and in digitalized ways via web browser and mobile devices. In order to support wealth managers in the most effective way Etops is building a specialized platform based on elements provided by Etops and associated companies, which serve as a foundation for further developments and add-ons delivered by 3rd parties. The central features of the Etops’ wealth management platform are as follows: Etops’ offerings include dedicated reports for specific asset classes like private equity and even cover dedicated reports for sustainable investments. Data collection, cleansing, enrichment and consolidation: Etops’ unique self-learning parser technology, combined with an experienced backoffice team, ensures comprehensive data and extremely low error rates. In many cases Etops enhances the data with additional information, e.g. data for fund calculation or sustainability criteria. Portfolio Management: A proven portfolio management solution ensures the structuring of assets, delivers comprehensive analyses, offers all necessary pre- and post-trade checks and ensures regulatory compliance. Reporting: Etops’ many years of experience in the segments of Family Office, HNWI and UHNWI serve as the basis for comprehensive modern reports in individual designs tailored to the asset manager's corporate identity.
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*Q&A Pius Stucki & Christian Jedlicka
The platform is constantly being extended, both through in-house developments and through the integration of interesting products from other manufacturers, in order to address special areas such as cross-border issues.
Deployment and development Etops also provide on-premise installations and even tailor-made solutions, but its offering for the wealth management market is focused on a SaaS-based platform. This guarantees a low-cost introduction to state-of-the-art software, short project times, constant updating, supply of all necessary data and modern standard reporting. Etops therefore has a wellstructured subscription model, with extensive options and a relatively high degree of flexibility which increases the attractiveness for independent asset managers, especially compared to traditional solutions.
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For the future, it will be important that asset management solutions not only deal with traditional financial market data, but also consider and interpret figures from the sustainability sector.
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End-customer access: Trend-setting data visualisation in web browsers, dashboards and on mobile devices, comply with today's customer requirements for constant information availability and thus ensure the future competitiveness of wealth managers.
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2. Introducing Finantix Key business facts: Founded 2000 HQ Address 11 Place Saint Pierre et Paul L-2334 Luxembourg Company Size 201-500 employees Website www.finantix.com Regional Presence Asia, Central America, North America, Oceania, Western Europe
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Company overview For over two decades, clients and analysts have recognised Finantix as the leading provider of trusted technology to the worldwide financial industry. Applying deep sector knowledge, we empower wealth managers, insurers and banks to digitally and intelligently engage with clients and provide insightful and compliant advice. By injecting artificial intelligence into a comprehensive yet modular, API-first platform, our proven technology enables holistic customer intelligence, sales and servicing productivity and individualised omnidevice experience. Our flagship platform can run in the cloud or be deployed as services that can help turn routine transactions into valued and collaborative interactions. It serves multiple actors across financial services organisations and is proven across multiple devices, languages, currencies, jurisdictions and regulations. We operate from offices across Europe, North America and Australasia.
Thought leader
Dr. Boris Rankov, Head of Digital Advisory Email: contact@finantix.com
Boris Rankov is a co-founder of InCube Group, which was acquired by Finantix earlier this year. At Finantix, he is Head of Digital Advisory. He has more than 15 years of experience in banking and wealth management, working with global financial institutions on digital transformation programs. His expertise lies primarily in the fields of wealth advisory, portfolio and risk management, as well as applying data science in the investment context. Boris holds a Masters degree and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the ETH Zurich (Dr. Sc. ETH).
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*Q&A Dr. Boris Rankov What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios? What are they doing well, what are the challenges, and what areas could be improved. Efficiency and accuracy within the portfolio management process is the holy grail of the asset manager. Time lags in updating portfolios when markets move substantially quickly add up and feed through to performance. Maintaining compliance is another issue within the portfolio management process. Our view is that by leveraging new tools and technologies available, wealth managers can actually improve communications within the portfolio management team and thus reduce costs, increase efficiency and smooth processes. In doing so they can also support and enhance the client experience. Our report, ‘Co Creation in wealth management’ underscores that poor investment performance does not automatically or exclusively trigger high levels of client dissatisfaction. It found that unsatisfactory service experience is the biggest factor. The report says that some 87% of HNWIs would change provider on the basis of poor customer experience. This can include dissatisfaction with regulatory processes that are necessary but hitherto painful in terms of the time input required, the timeliness of information exchanged and a general clunkiness.
Customer experience Technology within the investment management process creates better customer experience. It can help to deliver a collaborative approach by making all
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processes smooth and effective, as opposed to manual and repetitive. Indeed a highly collaborative and communicative approach to conducting and internally managing client relationships means pulling together data from right across the business and equipping advisors with automated relationship management tools and insights. RegTech is a vital part of that as without compliance there can be no business model in wealth management. Hence it is important to also be able to adapt to a regulatory approach that looks to share data and disseminate it to where it needs to go in a timely, accurate and efficient manner. Communications are key.
Communications Indeed, the big way in which technology can add to the customer experience is feeding client appetite for personalised and digitised communication. Covid19 has no doubt accelerated the demand for digitised delivery of information and data in a timely manner. Volatile markets make clients anxious and not having access to the insight, analytics and views on of the investment team compounds that. Internally too, technology enables better communications between the various components of the investment team. The Chief Investment Officer (‘CIO’), the research, the portfolio builders, the asset allocation and securities selection teams all need to be able to communicate effectively with each other to arrive at a ‘house view’. This view essentially feeds the front office, and thus the end client, with the proposed investment model. Eliminating manual processes and moving to streamlined way of communicating and sharing information and opinion makes sense for all.
The idea is to remove the internal silos around creating a portfolio and changing to a more visible and integrated approach which helps both the portfolio construction as well as the communication and transparency at the front end. This works for both an advisory and discretionary model. It is something that would be helpful to all banks no matter how big. Large wealth managers tend to have this entire function in silos as they build a portfolio using capital market assumptions, strategic and tactical asset allocations, and bottom-up asset selection. The result is that it takes a lot of resources to build a portfolio and so there is a need to standardize using model portfolios rather than something that is truly bespoke. Its makes it more effective to service lots of clients using segmentation on risk and so forth, but it is not a bespoke approach.
Bespoke offering A fully bespoke portfolio requires all this effort for an individual client and is only really done for UHNW clients on a discretionary basis. It is simply not cost effective to do it further down the wealth scale - especially when you take into account the high cost of compliance and the requirement of suitability and the time and cost of adhering to that. Increasing the number of advisers is not an option either – clients would get more face time but they would still not have access to something truly bespoke. Digitising the process however, and using technology to apply mandate and compliance rules, means that portfolio building can be democratised and people lower down the wealth scale can enjoy better levels of personalisation.
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*Q&A Dr. Boris Rankov This is very much in demand as customers become more aware and more involved in their investments. A good example of this is within the ESG sector where people have specific likes, dislikes and causes and want their investments to reflect that. They want to have a granular and in-depth knowledge of where they are invested, certainty that they have affinity with what is being suggested and to know what the thought process behind an investment suggestion is. We think that the efficiency gains provided by technology are a massive opportunity to move away from model portfolios and work to providing a bespoke portfolio creation service that is more nimble, accurate and transparent. Ultimately we think that using technology to deliver better client service levels, democratisation via digitisation, is a clear win for banks at a time when margins are under pressure and banks are looking to increase client loyalty, AUM and expand their reach.
What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better? The Finantix CIO Cockpit digitalises and enhances workflows for portfolio construction and content authoring capabilities to allow for strategic asset allocations (SAA), top-down house view and optimal tactical asset allocations (TAA), bottom-up data-driven product selection and efficient portfolios that follow the TAA. Moreover it provides a content management system for wealth management and investment processes as well as the authoring and distribution of CIO publications explaining portfolio shifts. The key features of CIO Cockpit include: Management and construction of strategic asset allocations based on capital market assumptions Absolute and relative views, qualitative and quantitative views, views on returns, volatilities and correlations FX views and implementation with FX forwards Data-driven bottom-up product equities, bonds and funds
selection
for
Risk/return efficient portfolio construction including various constraints and preferences Digital content authoring system for creation and distribution of House View and product content
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It central tenet is providing CIO’s with the means to distribute market updates and investment ideas to clients faster, leveraging digital communication and collaboration channels. The Cockpit caters to three core investment office functions – house view-driven asset allocation, criteriabased instrument selection, and content authoring. Bringing these three elements together makes for a smarter and more efficient way to author and publish investment commentaries and research relevant to end clients. The market volatility around the initial Covid19 outbreak amply demonstrated the need for such a tool. At that time there would have been a great many meetings of Investment Committees (‘IC’) where members would have been asking urgently to see the impact of the recent market turmoil due to Covid-19 on the bank’s portfolios. Perhaps the IC also wanted to test the impact of specific market views on the portfolios too. By moving from a spreadsheet-managed investment process and creating a digital view, we enable CIO’s to rapidly develop, implement and communicate market views and high conviction ideas. The Cockpit uses a mix of Finantix’s enterprise-grade technology; the CRM, advisory and collaborative components, with the datadriven and AI-enabled wealth management capabilities of recently acquired Swiss FinTech InCube. The two complement each other to give CIOs a set of tools that position them to deliver investment research and portfolios to clients with unprecedented speed.
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*Q&A Dr. Boris Rankov Having an efficient process to reach better understanding of the impact of forecasts and convictions on tactical and portfolios, being able to then easily explain views and investment ideas, and being able to distribute these in a personalized and frictionless way to relationship managers and clients creates in house efficiencies and makes for an adviser that is better equipped with the material to deliver an enhanced customer experience. Both are valuable in a world where cost efficiencies and customer retention must work together so that the business can thrive
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Digitising the process and using technology to apply mandate and compliance rules, means that portfolio building can be democratised and people lower down the wealth scale can enjoy better levels of personalisation.
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The Cockpit essentially allows CIOs accelerate the production and delivery of actionable intelligence.
Find out more about Finantix
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3. Introducing Finlight Key business facts: Founded 2016 HQ Address 20 St Thomas St London SE1 9RS Company Size 2-10 employees Website www.finlight.com Regional Presence Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Asia, Western Europe
Company overview Finlight launched in 2016 with the vision of making professional money management simpler, more effective and accessible for all allocators. Our portfolio management software help institutional asset allocators with all their investment reporting data consolidation needs. We eliminate data usability and confidentiality pitfalls of current legacy technologies (FTP, banking APIs) with our AI and NLP technologies so that reporting data is secure and simple to manage, integrate and analyse. Finlight was created by experienced wealth managers to help family offices and institutional investors address their pain points with regards to data aggregation, asset inclusion and data analysis. Finlight solves this problem by offering reporting data extraction and standardisation technology that substantially reduces the steps currently needed to collate, harmonise and upload data. Our reporting automation and portfolio management tools aggregate all reporting and data into one centralised, highly secure software.
Thought leader
JB Tanqueray, CEO Email: jb.tanqueray@finlight.com
JB has over twenty years managing multi-asset portfolios, of which ten as chief investment officer for family offices, providing his expertise in driving operational excellence and managing uncertainty. With access to first-hand knowledge of the current challenges and demands that family offices face, JeanBernard founded Finlight to address the observed inefficiencies by providing client-oriented, data-driven solutions to clients in a time and cost-effective manner. Prior to that, he performed a range of services including managing fund of hedge funds and improving operational processes and due diligence at Fortis Investments, rating institutional and alternative asset managers at FitchRating and managing risk at Citibank. He graduated with an MA in Finance from ESSCA (UniversitĂŠ Catholique de l'Ouest, Angers, France), followed by an MPhil in International Finance and Macroeconomics from Paris Dauphine University and an MBA from the London Business School.
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*Q&A JB Tanqueray What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios. What are they doing well, what are the challenges and what areas could be improved? The wealth management sector has been technologically underserved for far too long. Wealth managers face a Faustian dilemma with choices that create unnecessary operational burdens and costs. The first is to find a solution geared towards banks and more significant asset managers, which outsizes their needs and IT skills. The second is to use a variety of tools that require multiple manual inputs to address operational problems. The third is Excel, which addresses wealth managers' limitations and their ability to run timely, relevant analysis and reporting that truly helps their clients. Digital technologies allow us to address these challenges. Thanks to the myriad of existing tools such as Bloomberg PORT or accounting software, managing liquid portfolios has become a relatively straightforward process. However, the way Bloomberg's data is received impacts the reliability of data. Moreover, whilst accounting software is far more accurate, it typically does not provide advanced analytics. And finally, neither Bloomberg nor accounting software enable the effective consolidation of all assets. Current status & challenges Due to the costs and frictions of adopting technologies, a large number of wealth managers have opted to use Bloomberg and Excel and often, there are staff dedicated to keeping all these tools updated. These tools do not give wealth managers a 360 degree view across all assets and with market-led asset growth,
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wealth managers became less concerned with high costs this process entailed. The adoption of this approach poses two key challenges; firstly, the inability to quickly expand into new asset classes; and secondly, the difficulty of computing relevant risk indicators in a timely fashion. Both of these challenges inhibit proper risk management. Managing uncertainty requires a robust framework that no professional experience, however lengthy, can safely replace. Another option for wealth managers is to access web-based investment platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown or Morningstar Direct to manage their portfolios. These platforms however are geared towards fund investing and do not offer adequate portfolio construction tools across all assets. By not having the appropriate tools, this could result in inadequate recommendations and possibly ending in legal disputes. Conversely, private investing-focused management tools create their own operational risk hurdles when it comes to consolidating assets to guide next-step decisions. Given the above, the critical issue that wealth managers face is the lack of an end-to-end solution to manage portfolios effectively.
Reason to enhance your investment portfolio systems How can one manage a portfolio if accessing performance and relevant risk figures is a complex and lengthy process? This simple question should be the main driver forcing wealth managers to embrace portfolio management technology. Another significant reason is the subsequent lack of productivity, which limits portfolio managers' ability to grow and meet the next generations demands. Lastly, we witness wealth managers who do not realise the value and power of well-presented, hand-picked prospective data and how this can engage, reassure and retain clients. How we evaluate will change as relying on past performance is not sufficient to build a portfolio or prove success. Wealth managers positioned at the top of the market require a custom-made solution that only accurate and reliable data management enables. This would not be possible without the relevant technology. Opportunities Compliance requirements force wealth managers to map flows to adhere to relevant regulatory reporting requirements. These requirements represent the first opportunity to streamline portfolio management technology. The second opportunity is to embrace technology, which is lowering management costs without compromising the quality of the team as this will be a competitive advantage to consolidate businesses. This is particularly true if one believes that everything will go back to normal like before. The third is that digital technologies and Fintech provide an excellent opportunity to make portfolio technology cost-effective and more natural to adopt.
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*Q&A JB Tanqueray What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better As wealth managers and family officers ourselves, we have seen first-hand the lack of existing efficient solutions. They are either too expensive, not comprehensive enough, or too IT-intensive. These solutions create issues around total asset risk consolidation and management. Such existing tools are typically manually updated or they use a variety of expensive automated feeds depending on the custodians used. Furthermore, we believe that investors are not interested in seeing portfolio performance relative to a benchmark that fails to capture their risk profiles. Comparing a multiasset portfolio with a benchmark that only partially exhibits the risks an investor is prepared to take can lead to adverse selection and therefore, potential legal risks. Finally, wealth managers are driven by their investment expertise. They mainly hire investment experts and relationship managers. They need stronger operational support to minimise operational risks and costs whilst getting better at managing data. This means that they need simpler and far more reliable IT solutions that understand them rather than the other way round. It should not be a source of worry for them but rather the basis of consolidating competitive advantages. This should support management instead of making management unnecessarily complicated and costly. Put simply, wealth managers need a genuinely reliable technological solution that sustains their business without any IT pain.
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An introduction to Finlight Our solution is a portfolio management software that handles all asset types, including art and collectables. It does three things: 1. 2. 3.
automates asset data aggregation and reporting enables 360 degree asset overview in a short time supports next step decisions such as simulation, scenario analysis and portfolio construction
The Finlight solution is also community-driven and enables wealth managers to benchmark their management against their community of peers, adjusted for their risk levels. This way, they can learn from peers and access data to enhance decisions and pitch clients more transparently. Subsequently, the Finlight solution is also helping various wealth managers and family offices' manage multiple portfolios on one single platform.
Here is an example of a typical Finlight client, outlining their problems and how we can address such issues. We work with a family office with multiple principals at different life stages and with various cash-flows constraints. Our software enables our client to automatically create the optimal asset allocation for each principal based on their current assets, liabilities and future constraints. Matching those requires a certain risk level, which our tools express in terms of the value at risk using past risk data. Risks are more straightforward to quantify and forecast than returns. Alternatively, they can use our tool to calculate the average risk premia for a given investment horizon. With our software, portfolio adequacy can be easily proven and truly customised to one's constraints, regardless of the number of constraints wealth managers have to manage. This is also a way to create a reliable strategic benchmark to measure their value-add with the right risk characteristics. Finlight’s main features are as follow; Data management: Our tools enable our clients to have all their input reporting data (custodian statements, GP reporting‌) locally and safely stored on our FINMAcompliant private cloud. There is no need to manually file such data whilst enjoying 24/7 accessibility. Data extraction: All the content is analysed, structured and aggregated in a general ledger per portfolio and client. It is easy to export into existing software and workflows without manual key-in. Client reporting: Our tool allows clients to view all assets in one location. It includes performance attribution, risk decomposition, portfolio impact and return drivers. Reporting is performed automatically so that wealth managers save time and money, with savings reinvested in investment research.
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*Q&A JB Tanqueray
Next-step decisions: Wealth managers need to assess the impact of their choices before executing such decisions. This is part of their duty to be diligent. We enable them to quantify their impact thanks to our scenario and stress analysis feature. This also allows wealth managers to drill down to each risk contributor to identify those they may want to lever on. Users can utilise that feature to engage with clients and better explain their decisions. In this case, we enabled one single family office to enhance portfolio construction and ensure that the portfolio is structured appropriately. Portfolio management: Managing multiple portfolios is cumbersome and can be subject to a compliance inquiry from a fair dealing and best execution perspective. In this case, a wealth manager seeks to replicate decisions across all clients' portfolios within the guidelines of the portfolio. With our tools, the lead portfolio manager manages one central model portfolio that best reflects its views. Our tool replicates these model portfolios for each client according to the risk level. Orders are edited automatically with relevant audit trails. There's no better way to prove fair account dealing and consistency across all accounts in such a seamless manner. Orders are created automatically but emailed to the wealth manager account so that he or she transfers it to the broker or banks that he or she deals with.
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Activity tracking: Our 'Activity' screen summarises all information that you receive regarding portfolios, allocations, etc., allowing you to keep track of all the information flow in a single location. Private equity: Your commitments to different private equity funds with varying records of capital are presented under one screen, allowing you to review and manage all your financial commitments in a much simpler, more accessible way. It is also important to note that our software is cloud-based in a highly secure, Switzerland-based private server. This way, wealth managers have a central platform that supports their business without increasing costs or going through the usual IT hurdles. It instead unlocks productivity and enables wealth managers to gain time to do what they are best at, which is managing wealth.
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As wealth managers and family officers ourselves, we have seen first-hand the lack of existing efficient solutions. They are either too expensive, not comprehensive enough or too IT-intensive.
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Value enhancement: A group of family offices were keen to understand how they behave against one another, anonymously and according to their risk level. Our users were able to benchmark themselves against the community's aggregate portfolio, adjusted to their risk levels. This way, they can assess where they add value, learn from each other and monitor the investments their community favours. This is further enriched by our expert risk managers who can act as the outsourced independent risk officers. It is useful for the yearly independent portfolio audit and review that most transparent wealth managers offer for their clients.
Find out more about Finlight
Deployment Enjoying all these features is straightforward; unlike all other tools we do not need APIs. Our users just need to open an account, select the features required and then simply upload investment statements or portfolio accounting. Our artificial-intelligence-based technology scans all data and categorises it by principal, portfolio and asset class. Through the incorporation of our services, you can easily create your portfolios. The service collates all new statements, manager reporting and trade notifications, which are automatically sent to an encrypted email address of your choice. We will automate quality checks to ensure all is correctly booked in. Positions prices are also automatically updated. We are here to help you unlock your investment reporting data and can customise our products to your specific needs.
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4. Introducing SEI Key business facts: Founded 1968 HQ Address Oaks Pennsylvania United States Company Size 1,001-5,000 employees Website www.seic.com Regional Presence Asia, Europe, North America, South Africa
Company overview
Thought leader
SEI (NASDAQ:SEIC) is a leading global provider of investment processing, investment management, and investment operations solutions that help corporations, financial institutions, financial advisors, and ultra-high-net-worth families create and manage wealth. The SEI Wealth PlatformSM is an end-to-end wealth processing and wealth management service providing technology and operational outsourcing. Delivering front, middle and back office services within a single infrastructure; the proposition supports the entire firm and customer lifecycle with embedded workflows from prospecting to onboarding to investing to re-advising customers. Built on a single configurable code base, the platform provides efficiency and cost savings combined with the ability to offer tools tailored to specific business segments (e.g. Portfolio Management or Adviser Desktop Tools) and to integrate seamlessly with other technology providers of a client’s choice.
Brett Williams, CEO of SEI Investments (Europe) Limited, Managing Director of SEI Wealth Platform UK Email: seiwealthplatformuk@seic.com
Managing Director for SEI's UK Private Banking business, Brett is responsible for the development and growth of the SEI Wealth Platform in the UK. Working in close partnership with wealth managers, Brett focuses on optimising the SEI Wealth Platform capabilities to complement each client's core strengths along with pursuing continuous innovation to enhance solution development. Brett has over 30 years of leadership experience in the financial services industry, including Chief Executive Officer roles at Selestia, Cofunds and Skandia UK.
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*Q&A Brett Williams What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios. What are they doing well, what are the challenges, and what areas could be improved? Although we have seen an increased use of technology across the UK wealth management industry, many firms still haven’t fully embraced the benefits of technology as a facilitator to operating their business in an efficient, scalable, robust and sophisticated way. UK wealth managers can find themselves lagging behind their counterparts in other regions, such as Switzerland, where firms have been quicker to embrace technology. Some are still using old legacy systems and traditional, spreadsheet dominated processes, to manage their investment portfolios. For example, there are countless examples of firms utilising hundreds of spreadsheets to cover their model portfolios. For those firms still using traditional portfolio management processes there are significant challenges:
Administration burden Front office staff are crucial in delivering organic growth. Time spent on manual, administrative processes can distract focus from creating competitive advantage for their firm by cultivating the relationships that are fundamental to the growth of the business. Additionally, these tasks may reduce job satisfaction which could result in good quality investment managers leaving, often taking clients with them.
Greater need for personalisation Firms need to be in a position to efficiently deliver their
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central investment philosophy but customisation is becoming increasingly important to clients. Clients are becoming more educated in investments, with increased information at their disposal, resulting in more complex requirements. Delivering a highly personalised service without technology can be particularly time-consuming and not scalable, requiring firms to consider additional headcount as client lists grow.
Risk of inconsistent outcomes Highly manual processes can increase the possibility that clients could receive inconsistent investment outcomes. This potential irregularity is a key risk for firms, given the importance the regulator places on providing consistent client outcomes.
Lack of oversight Inconsistent processes and document tracking can result in a lack of access to data across the firm, creating challenges for senior management in having oversight of the firm’s performance as a whole. These oversight challenges only increase for larger, global firms operating across multiple jurisdictions
Why should wealth managers look to use or increase the use of technology in how they manage their investments. What factors are influencing the move and what benefits those enhancements could bring? The right technology provides a strong foundation for modern wealth managers to more efficiently deliver their value proposition to clients, ultimately offering greater potential opportunities for growth.
Increased efficiencies and scalability As firms face increasing cost pressures, technology allows them to meet the challenge of providing wealth management at scale. A robust foundation of technology can enable efficient delivery of their value proposition to their clients without the need for additional resources as they grow.
Personalisation at scale Portfolio management technology can balance the use of a central investment philosophy with the need to personalise for an individual client, to meet their unique goals, their tax preferences or their need to avoid certain types of investments. Using a tool that helps deliver this personalisation at scale can also open up further growth opportunities for wealth managers, allowing them to service clients with more complicated requirements than before. Additionally, technology can ensure that centralised investment thinking is used across the firm, helping to deliver standardised outcomes for similar clients across the firm.
Improved access to data The right solution provides access to data, in a usable format that can be analysed to help enable improved business decisions. These solutions help to enable greater oversight and standardised processes, whether the model is centralised, decentralised, global or local.
Meeting the changing demands of client and employee As the demographic of both the client and the employee changes there will only be greater pressure on wealth managers to increase their use of technology
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*Q&A Brett Williams as this will be an expected part of their experience. The next generation of wealth managers will be increasingly accustomed to using technology and open to challenging their firm in this area.
What opportunities do you see for wealth managers to more effectively use technology to better manage their investment portfolios and what actions should firms take to move forward in this area? Process changes and new technology can result in some resistance within firms. The attitude of senior management is crucial to the success of any technology implementation. There needs to be a top-down adoption for any new technology, with executives supporting and driving the change by encouraging staff to embrace the new processes and clearly articulating the benefits that the right technology can bring as a foundation for growth. Crucially, before selecting technology or a technology partner, firms need to be clear on their objectives. Ineffective or legacy technology which drive internal processes can often be used as a vehicle to hide behind, providing an excuse for bad business performance. Remaining outcome-driven and not process-driven is critical to ensuring that the correct solution is chosen. It is possible to become distracted by processes during the selection but trying to shoehorn an old process into new technology may fail to deliver the desired outcomes. Finally, technology should be chosen carefully to ensure that it can integrate with current systems. Firms could face challenges when trying to implement a new wealth management system and integrating this with legacy technology is likely to raise its own unique challenges.
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What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better? SEI believes there are six stand out problems for modern wealth management firms that our solution aims to address: 1.
Manual processes and lack of efficiency Administrative processes distract wealth managers from focusing on the end client
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Inability to scale Legacy systems can prove costly and difficult to maintain with the higher demands of the modern wealth management client
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Reduced ability to facilitate or support growth Traditional solutions can struggle to offer the flexibility to efficiently service clients with more complicated needs, limiting growth opportunities
4. Lack of consistent client engagement Lack of integration and flexibility between proposal generation tools, portfolio management systems and performance reporting 5.
Lack of effective investment oversight Impairs ability to understand effectiveness of investment decisions and implementation
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Regulatory challenges Ever increasing regulation along with required speed of compliance means the solution needs to be adaptable
Our solution delivers infrastructure that supports client onboarding and mandate creation, portfolio administration and management as well as performance reporting and oversight. The SEI Wealth Platform’s Portfolio Manager Experience (PME) streamlines the portfolio management process and automates administrative tasks that have previously been undertaken by client facing teams. Portfolio administration, management and monitoring infrastructure allow firms to efficiently deliver their investment best thinking, across centralised or decentralised models and on a local or global level. The flexible system supports new growth, client types and propositions (models, bespoke, both internal and external managers and fund businesses). PME provides a holistic view of an investor’s investments, enabling the advisor to engage with the client through multiple touch points. It also provides complex portfolio management including households and tax management supporting all major asset classes and multi-currency for processing and reporting purposes. PME allows our clients to recognise the specific needs of the end-customer and deliver a personalised experience at scale. PME is event based in its nature, focusing on the experience of a portfolio manager and their working day. Developed by spending time with portfolio managers to understand how they work, we identified events that may require investment action as they appear, helping portfolio managers ‘organise’ their day and stay on top of accounts through monitoring tools that enable effective management. Without this, it can be difficult to identify accounts requiring attention, leading to a less effective approach to workflow management.
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*Q&A Brett Williams are already benefiting from this modular approach by utilising ‘SEI Trade’ offering materials, transaction documents and on-boarding forms electronically.
Our portfolio management and performance tools come together to allow firms to address their reporting needs. Additionally, we understand the increasing regulatory pressures our clients are facing and actively support them to meet their compliance requirements whilst minimising the cost of regulatory reporting. For example, we have developed regulatory services, such as 10% depreciation reporting, that are designed through a collaborative process with our client community.
Additionally, in a strong example of our innovation and development, we are currently bringing together existing and new technologies at SEI to provide a full end-to-end service (from order initiation to settlement and price collection) for hedge fund processing for a Global Private Bank. We are building a brand new Order Management System specifically for the management of hedge funds, enabling firms to create and manage an internal secondary market for their customers. We are then integrating existing SEI technology to digitise the execution management of a traditionally paper process.
Deployment and development
Other developments include the introduction of our API Gateway with APIgee providing self-service APIs for integration into front-end systems. One Platform client is utilising more than 67 web services and piloting full on-boarding for end clients demonstrating both collaboration and innovation in this area.
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The right technology provides a strong foundation for modern wealth managers to more efficiently deliver their value proposition to clients
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Investment oversight tools, which include PME and performance reporting alongside SEI’s integrated business reporting solution, provide pre and post trade monitoring capability enabling firms to monitor the effectiveness of the delivery of their investment best thinking, in line with their agreed client mandate. This supports them in achieving consistent outcomes. This can be deployed at a local or global operating level, as demonstrated by one of our recent global clients who operates across nine geographic regions.
Find out more about SEI
The Portfolio Manager Experience (“PME”) is available for clients of the SEI Wealth Platform. Portfolio management is delivered as part of the full end-to-end SEI infrastructure. Our clients see the benefits of a fully integrated system, vendor consolidation along with consistent and established processes. SEI is pivoting to a new technology strategy, ‘One SEI.’ Enabled by data management this leverages open architecture and modular components from across SEI’s multiple platforms. As a result, in the future it is likely that PME could be delivered as a standalone component. UK clients of the SEI Wealth Platform
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For Wealth Managers, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to help them discover the solutions and solution providers that are relevant to the needs of their business more easily, as well as stay on top of the key trends in the market. Learn more about how TWM supports Wealth Managers
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5. Introducing SIX Key business facts: Founded 2008 HQ Address Pfingstweidstrasse 110, 8005 Zürich Switzerland Company Size 1,001 -5,000 employees Website www.six-group.com Regional Presence Global
Company overview
Thought leader
SIX operates and develops infrastructure services for the Swiss Stock Exchange, Banking Services and Financial Information sectors with the aim of raising efficiency, quality and innovative capacity across the entire value chain of the Swiss financial center. With a workforce of some 2,600 employees and a presence in 20 countries, SIX generated operating income of CHF 1.13 billion and a Group net profit of CHF 120.5 million in 2019. The Swiss Stock Exchange itself offers comprehensive listing, trading and post-trading services, making use of our unique value chain, and products and services that best serve your needs. As a central infrastructure provider, SIX safeguards the flow of information and cash between financial institutions, traders, investors and service providers around the world. All systemically important legal entities of SIX are subject to supervision by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).
Christophe Lapaire, Head Advanced Tax Services, SIX Email: christophe.lapaire@six-group.com
Christophe Lapaire is a senior executive with over 20 years’ experience in the banking industry. He has worked for the Swiss National Bank and several Private Banks in Switzerland, giving him a strong background in Asset Management, Product Management and global Operations. Prior to joining SIX in 2012, Christophe was Head of Operations of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA in Geneva, and COO of HSBC Guyerzeller Bank AG in Zürich. Christophe has studied Literature at the University of Geneva, holds a degree in Business Administration and has performed an Advanced Executive Program at the Swiss Finance Institute in Zürich. Christophe is President of the Swiss Finance Institute Alumni Association.
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*Q&A Christophe Lapaire Taxing times for investors Investors – including high net worth individuals (HNWIs) – are likely to face a period of prolonged economic hardship post-Covid-19. With dividend payments at a number of blue chip companies temporarily suspended and interest rates across major markets hovering at unprecedented lows, returns for many investors are expected to evaporate over the next 12 months. Although active fund managers and index tracking products have enjoyed a performance turnaround as equity markets moved into positive territory after the extreme volatility in March, many investors acknowledge that this bounce could be a temporary one. For countless investors, the long-term risks of Covid-19 have yet to be priced into their portfolios. In fact, a number of ratings agencies including Moody’s Investor Services have put the asset management industry on a negative watch. As a result, private banks and wealth advisers are on alert and need to find ways to maximise their clients’ revenues. The impact of these negative headwinds could, however, be blunted if wealth managers and private banks were to optimise and digitalise some of their operational processes. Identifying solutions to mitigate the impact of tax on portfolio performance would be a good starting point. It is also something which the Swiss Stock Exchange can help support.
Tax takes its toll on return generation Despite a number of countries - including the UK – providing generous capital gains exemptions for foreign investors transacting in their local markets, plenty others do not. Italy, for instance, imposes a 26% tax on foreign investors selling domestic securities, whereas Switzerland applies a 35% withholding tax on dividends being paid out to resident and non-resident
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investors. Even though double tax treaties exist to prevent double taxation on dividends, not all investors are able to obtain tax efficiencies when investing in overseas securities markets. This can have a negative impact on overall portfolio performance.
The same problem rings true at some of the smaller private banks and wealth managers. Many of these institutions – although they can deliver a degree of tax optimisation around portfolio management to end clients – do not always have the infrastructure to perform this role effectively. However, some of the larger private banks and wealth managers do have the systems and digital capabilities to carry out tax optimisation and have since returned vast sums of withholding taxes to their clients as a result. With beneficial owners becoming increasingly sensitive to costs coupled with the ongoing decline in product margins, tax optimisation is a major value-add that private banks and wealth managers can provide.
... Tax complexities breed challenges There are a number of reasons as to why investors are not getting the tax benefits they are entitled to. Firstly, tax claims are a notoriously complex subject matter. Compounding matters further are that different markets adopt their own unique approaches towards tax. Often, the local rules around tax can change arbitrarily, sometimes with limited warning. This lack of harmonisation often makes investing in equity markets across multiple jurisdictions incredibly cumbersome from a tax perspective. As investors do not always have the tax expertise nor the systems and processes in place to routinely monitor for tax changes across multiple jurisdictions, they may incur higher tax charges in certain markets, which they should otherwise have avoided.
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*Q&A Christophe Lapaire A solution that delivers Banking and wealth management clients are increasingly demanding that their providers offer them tax optimisation services, and this is something that has been accelerated by the global implementation of the Automatic Exchange of Information. A failure by banks and wealth managers to adapt to their clients’ requirements could result in them losing business to competitors who offer this service. Investing in the systems to facilitate tax optimisation is not without its costs. In response, private banks and wealth managers are now looking to leverage the services of providers such as the Swiss Stock Exchange to obtain tax benefits for clients. As part of this, the Swiss Stock Exchange will manage the complexity of the process on behalf of wealth managers and private banks, by coordinating all of their tax activities with the relevant tax authorities.
The service is accessible through ATS Portal – the single-window access point to the ATS-Tax Reclaim service. A smart online application, based on innovative technology, the ATS Portal allows you to upload all data and documents essential to the tax reclaim process.
The Swiss Stock Exchange provides a number of solutions around tax, including Relief at Source, Quick Refund and Tax Reclaim services. Its new Advanced Tax Services (ATS – Tax Reclaim Service) is an innovative and smart one stop shop solution aimed at banks and wealth managers. Most significantly, the service is readily available to organisations irrespective of whether their assets are held in custody at the Swiss CSD (SIX SIS Ltd.), a level of flexibility which is genuinely unique to the ATS-Tax Reclaim product. But how does ATS-Tax Reclaim support users?
Smart bundling of underlying securities transactions into a formal tax reclaim over the longest possible reclaim period. Depending on the market, this can be as long as several years.
At the most basic level, ATS-Tax Reclaim enables banks to offer a reclaim service at reasonable costs thereby helping them deliver value to their clients. The solution provided by the Swiss Stock Exchange is a straightforward endto-end tax reclaim service, which has been developed over the last three years in close collaboration with its clients, namely domestic and international private banks and wealth managers. Given the sensitivity of the data being handled, ATS-Tax Reclaim has been designed to meet the highest data protection and security standards.
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Core functions of the ATS Portal include: Online transactions and data upload facility for banks. Automatic, near-time validation of data is provided and automatic validation of instructions. A client-centric dashboard provides visibility for the bank across multiple activities.
The bank defines the minimum amounts for reclaims, and this is freely configurable by markets, according to their underlying clients’ bespoke requirements. Historicisation of transactions below the minimum reclaim amount is defined for inclusion in the next reclaim cycle. This means there are no losses attributed to smaller transactions and an overall better reclaim performance for end clients.
Supporting the tax requirements of market participants The ATS-Tax Reclaim solution offers a huge number of advantages to private banks and wealth managers globally. In addition to allowing banks to provide a new service to end clients, it will allow them to increase their book of business and entrench existing commercial relationships. That this service is being delivered by the Swiss Stock Exchange – a financial market infrastructure – as opposed to a competitor or consultant is also a very enticing proposition.
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Archive of transactions with online access to data history and easy data export facility for banks.
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*Q&A Christophe Lapaire
Externalising these processes to vendors with best in class, competitively priced technology solutions also helps providers reduce their operational risk. Given the ongoing challenges facing organisations as a result of Covid-19, this could allow firms to deploy more resources to critical, revenue generating areas of the business. This will enable private banks and wealth managers to enhance the levels of service to their own end clients, providing for a more enjoyable user experience. The ATS-Tax Reclaim solution is designed to cover around 90%-95% of the requirements of target clients; and provides support across a wide range of investment domiciles, client tax domiciles, asset classes, clients and account types.
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Maximising revenue potential through operational efficiencies Financial institutions and investors alike are poised to face significant challenges over the next 12 to 18 months. With returns expected to significantly decline, investors need to ensure they can maximise performance, something which can be achieved by finding operational efficiencies, especially through mechanisms such as tax optimisation. Simultaneously, it is crucial that private banks and wealth managers continue delivering a high calibre service to HNWI clients if they are to retain business moving forward. This is something that can be achieved through valueadd services such as tax optimisation. By leveraging the expertise of the Swiss Stock Exchange, private banks and wealth managers will be able to deepen their product suites, and offer a wider range of services to clients.
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The impact of the current negative headwinds from Covid-19 could, however, be blunted if wealth managers and private banks were to optimise and digitalise some of their operational processes. Identifying solutions to mitigate the impact of tax on portfolio performance would be a good starting point. It is also something which the Swiss Stock Exchange can help support.
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The Swiss Stock Exchange is widely accepted as being an industry leader when it comes to digitalisation and innovation across all facets of its business. Simultaneously, the Swiss Stock Exchange employs some of the leading authorities on tax, thereby ensuring clients receive a high quality, high-touch service. One of the biggest benefits for clients, however, is that by outsourcing tax optimisation to the Swiss Stock Exchange, they will no longer need to make significant, fixed investments into their systems or maintain dedicated tax operations experts. Given how fluid tax policies and regulations are globally, this will help firms generate major cost synergies at a time when operating costs are coming under pressure.
Find out more about SIX
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6. Introducing Tindeco Key business facts: Founded 2010 HQ Address Gotthardstrasse 20, CH-6300 Zug, Switzerland Company Size 11-50 employees Website www.tindecofs.com Regional Presence Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North America, Western Europe
Company overview
Thought leader
Tindeco is a FinTech based in Zug (Switzerland) and Edinburgh (Scotland). Tindeco was founded in 2010 by Michael Kaimakliotis and Neil McLachlan. Their many years of experience managing money (Michael) and investment technology (Neil) left them with the understanding that the investment management industry could be dramatically improved. They founded Tindeco with the clear mission to develop a new technology platform in order to redefine investment management. The result is the awardwinning Tindeco VISION system.
Michael Kaimakliotis, CEO
VISION has been designed for investment managers by investment managers with the twin business objectives of 1. enabling managers to become dramatically more efficient – supporting managers in reducing costs and obtaining scalable growth and 2. leveraging that efficiency to provide better investment products: highly customised to specific investment objectives and risk tolerances. VISION supports managers in investment product design, strategy development, portfolio construction, order implementation, risk and performance analytics, audit, compliance and client management.
Email: info@tindecofs.com
Michael Kaimakliotis has been CEO of Tindeco since 2010. He has been in leadership positions since 1999 at some of the world’s leading investment managers and investment banks and been responsible for managing more than $100bn. Michael developed new products and services supported by new investment processes and now has spearheaded the development of a technology platform designed to help the industry redefine itself by a) providing clients portfolios with highly customizable investment objectives and risk limits and to b) creating performance by utilising multiple systematic investment strategies as the core of the investment process. He has been a speaker at the Deutsche Bundesbank and South African Reserve Bank and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been published in the Journal of Portfolio Management and featured in the Financial Times for his Nuanced Investing concept which applies financial engineering to portfolio management.
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*Q&A Michael Kaimakliotis What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios. What are they doing well, what are the challenges, and what areas could be improved? We consider there to be three main categories of wealth managers: 1. wealth management platforms like private banks 2. digital advisers like robo-advisers and 3. Boutiques and fund managers currently focused on institutional clients who are moving into private wealth management. The main distinguishing factors are the degree of customization they offer and the scale of their business. But the business models are converging as new technology platforms like Tindeco VISION enable scalable customization. Digital advisers offer a low degree of customization but have a highly scalable business model. Retail clients have modest expectations and the digital advisory solutions are acceptable. But their challenge is to offer interesting products tailored to their clients’ needs to meet the needs of more discerning high net worth clients. Platforms such as Private Banks offer some customization and operate with a moderate degree of scalability. The economics of their business model tends to deteriorate as they offer greater customization. Leading consultancies estimate that the core business of European private banks is unprofitable. Our experience working at such institutions is consistent with this conclusion: offering customization weighs on profitability due to the lack of supportive technology. Boutiques and fund managers generally offer a limited number of specialized products which they will customize for clients in a managed accounts program.
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They offer a high degree of customization if minimum investment thresholds are met and tend to operate with a low degree of scalability. They have realized that they have much greater pricing power when offering customized portfolios to wealthy clients than to institutional clients. Therefore, they see a great profit opportunity if they are able to improve scalability.
to manage large numbers of customized portfolios. Small and mid-size fund managers often lack the scale to both operate and afford enterprise solutions. That leaves fund managers of all sizes reliant on in-house tools wherever flexibility is required. These tools are often not as robust nor as scalable as well-engineered modern software.
Scalability correlates with the cost of “manufacturing” investment portfolios and the degree of operating leverage that can be attained i.e. the degree to which additional portfolios can be managed without meaningful rises in the cost to the manager.
To understand platforms better we must recognize that there is a big difference between a bank and a non-bank platform. Banks operate in a core-bankingsystem centric world. Core banking systems have been built to support securities servicing, accounting, payments, and reconciliation. Such tasks are far removed from the actual investment decisions of the front office. But private banks technology spend is generally dominated by core banking and there is often a significant impetus from the IT department to extend the capabilities of the core banking system rather than employ technologies that were specifically designed to support investment managers. Other platforms which do not operate a core banking system generally have a more flexible approach which can help them to adopt new technologies which are more appropriate for front-office workflows.
Customization correlates with the benefit to the client and the degree of pricing power available to the manager. Clearly, the ability to deliver scalable customisation is a priority for each manager type. Not surprisingly, fund managers are most interested in ways to improve their scalability so that they can leverage their specialized management capabilities to provide customized solutions. Platforms like private banks are interested in providing greater customization (to distinguish themselves from digital advisers and let them price like boutiques), as well as improving their scalability (reducing costs in reaction to margin compression). Digital advisers are increasingly striving to provide more customized solutions to avoid becoming commoditized. Each of these wealth manager types uses technology in different ways and struggles with certain aspects. Large fund managers are typically running sophisticated and complex technology systems – many of which were designed for the sell-side. These systems may be appropriate for running a limited number of sophisticated portfolios but they were not designed
Digital advisers generally have solid platforms since they were built within the past decade. However, the capabilities are often severely limited. For example, many digital advisers built platforms designed to be suitable for handling ETF-only portfolios. Focusing on a single, quite simple instrument type allows for rapid progress but poses long term risks. There are many vendors of investment technology that started by creating a solution for one asset class or one market and we speak to many investment managers today who highlight the weaknesses of such solutions
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*Q&A Michael Kaimakliotis when they are extended to handle a wider variety of usecases. The platforms of digital advisers in many instances will need to be redesigned or replaced in order to meet new broader requirements. There are a few points which I believe sum up the state of wealth management today: Most buy-side systems have been designed to promote scalability in the back and middle office. Front office capabilities in buy-side systems often revolve around trading / order management since many of these solutions were adapted from the sellside. Wealth platforms with core banking systems tend to have platforms which provide particularly poor support for the investment function. The main platforms provide weak support for investment managers, especially in areas such as investment decision support and portfolio construction. There is an almost complete absence of technology which effectively supports investment managers in providing customized portfolio solutions. There is an absence of technology support for systematic / quantitative investment processes outside of simple rebalancing rules. Quantitative processes such as risk-management tend to be box-ticking exercises for the middle office rather than value-add for the investment managers. Support for the steps of an investment process which require the most flexibility revolve around the use of Excel.
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What solution(s)s does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better? We believe that Tindeco VISION represents a quantum leap forward in investment management technology. VISION has been designed to provide scalable (mass) customization of virtually any investment product or portfolio. Tindeco’s mission is to a) support private banks in extending their ability to offer customized portfolios while maintaining scalability and b) help specialized asset managers deliver customized versions of their specialized (fund) products via managed accounts. In the previous section we outlined the status quo in wealth management. One of the main conclusions is that the front office investment manager has received poor support from technology. We also noted the desire of all players to increase customization as well as the difficulties they face in doing so. In order to understand the benefits of Tindeco VISION let’s examine the main obstacles that traditional platforms face and discuss how VISIONs design enables them to be overcome.
1. Investment management processes are complicated – many functions need to interact (each with their own requirements and perspectives). Modern software engineering today enables enterprise solutions without the traditional drawbacks of a monolithic software solution: the boundaries of enterprise software are no longer fixed and the inner workings are now transparent and flexible. Tindeco VISION’s cloud architecture uses micro-services and a set of internal APIs to communicate both internally and externally. Strong internal communication of services within VISION enables functions such as the CRM, Risk Management and Order Management to share information and collaborate to deliver functionality such as pre-trade risk compliance checks. This design also lets VISION seamlessly integrate with virtually any set of incumbent technology in place at an investment manager.
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*Q&A Michael Kaimakliotis Micro services with APIs also enable investment managers to decide how to use the services since these can be called with a set of parameters passed to the API which tells the service how to behave.
2. Investment processes are wildly diverse. We’ve designed VISION based upon a set of generic objects and parameterizable functions. Our experience running investment management companies and managing money ourselves helped us to understand that no fixed view of data and no fixed set of functions will enable investment managers to implement their various investment processes. So VISION was designed to be much more flexible than traditional platforms. It starts with data: VISION lets you name and group assets in different ways for the functional objective you are seeking to achieve. It goes further with risk: VISION lets you model risk so that you are measuring the risks to which your investment decisions correspond. And it triumphs with our generic meta-investmentprocess: VISION has a collection of objects which allow you to design portfolios on a modular basis and build up each component according to specific investment strategies, rebalancing routines and workflows. Top-down and bottom-up investment decisions can be propagated across modules in customizable ways to deliver complex products. And client level objectives, tolerances and restrictions can be accommodated with a scalable rulesbased approach that you define. Investment managers can implement their specific investment processes directly within VISION.
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3. Investment processes are often unsystematic Most investment processes are a collection of both systematic and discretionary or ad-hoc approaches. VISION was designed to enable you to specify your systematic workflows and processes while retaining the ability to incorporate ad-hoc decision making to express your investment expertise. Ad-hoc (or insightbased) investment decisions can be an important part of an investment process but it is often desirable to monitor and limit the degree to which such decisions can impact a portfolio.
All of our quantitative functionalities from risk measurement to scenario generation to optimization and strategy design and testing are based on providing customizable frameworks. Investment managers can model assets using the models they find appropriate for the task at hand. Investment strategy frameworks support multitudes of strategies depending upon the parameters selected. Optimisation problems of many different types can be solved using various techniques and a selection of internal and third party optimisers. VISION shows you the possible solvers based upon the objectives and constraints that you set.
4. Complex mathematics is required Modeling asset return characteristics and covariances is important for measuring risk and performance but also for estimating fair-values and identifying investment or arbitrage opportunities. Few technology vendors have the same DNA as quantitative investment managers. Those that do, have generally focused on providing bespoke software solutions to highly specialized hedge funds or trading desks at investment banks / (highfrequency) traders or market-makers. At Tindeco our CEO began his career working on the automation of market-making and trading of equity / equity derivatives strategies. This experience provided our motivation to tackle the much more complicated problem faced by wealth-managers: automating the management of a wide variety of (ideally customized) portfolios.
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*Q&A Michael Kaimakliotis Automation of manufacturing processes is easy in comparison to the automation of investment (and risk) management. One of the main distinctions is the degree of randomness present in financial markets. Every kind of automation depends upon rules. Automation of investment decisions requires a) a systematic approach to designing and working with rules (which can represent investment strategies or systematic workflows e.g. rebalancing or cash management rules) and b) a model of the randomness and specifically the ability to forecast how asset prices will evolve and co-vary going forward. VISION was designed from the ground up to work with rules. Rules or strategies are treated just like portfolios and assets within VISION. A rule can be a portfolio and hold its own assets just like a virtual fund. The assets held by the rule will evolve over time in systematic ways depending upon the future state of the world.
Tindeco VISION comprises the following systems and engines: VISION Portfolio Management, VISION Risk, VISION Order Management, VISION CRM, VISION Backtesting Engine, VISION Simulation Engine, VISION Optimisation Engine, VISION Rules Engine.
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Support for systematic and / or quantitative rule-based investment processes is required to enable the scalable management of customized portfolios. Tindeco VISION is the first platform that supports investment managers in scalably offering customised portfolios and advice!
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5. Automation / optimisation of processes based upon responding to random events is hard
Find out more about Tindeco
We needed to understand how rules would behave under realistic financial market scenarios: so we built an advanced simulation engine that forecasts both how assets will evolve and covary as well as how investment rules or strategies will behave - contingent upon the paths that assets take. Finally, we needed to be able to construct optimal portfolios which consisted of rules, normal assets or both. VISION’s Optimization Engine enables us to construct portfolios based upon any and all of the paths that the assets and strategies might take. This provides VISION with a truly generic approach to building portfolios – which can be partially or fully systematic.
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Tindeco VISION:
out of the box Digitalisation for Wealth Managers! Tindeco VISION provides you with a complete, highly flexible framework to efficiently design and implement your unique investment process. VISION supports you to design and manage products/portfolios of all kinds and enables you to provide the customisation that your clients deserve. If you choose to design systematic portfolios, VISION is the only platform capable of helping you to construct optimal rules-based portfolios and implement them in a highly automated manner.
Find out how Tindeco can help you succeed
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The VISION Stylised Investment Process 1. Product Design Investment managers can use VISION to design portfolios and products using a systematic and modular approach. Optimal portfolios / benchmarks can be determined using our three main VISION Investments engines a) backtesting b) forward looking simulation and c) optimisation. Portfolios can be partially or fully rules-based. VISION is the first investment management platform designed to help you design, test and implement systematic investment products / solutions enabling you to automate large parts of your investment process. 2. Strategy / Rules Testing & Development Managers can design and test systematic investment and hedging strategies which can be included in portfolios. 3. Instrument / Strategy Selection Instrument and / or strategy selection can be done by the managers’ research analysts or on the basis of quantitative models (strategies). 4. Investment Components Building blocks / investment components can be created based upon asset classes, factors, themes or systematic strategies.
5. Investment Committee An Investment Committee can provide a Tactical Asset Allocation for a Master Portfolio. 6. Composites This TAA can then be applied to each composite in a consistent manner. This provides target allocations for each component – resulting in a diversified instrument-level composite product or model portfolio.
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The VISION Stylised Investment Process 7. Customised End Client Portfolios Each composite product / model portfolio can then be further customised using a variety of systematic approaches to meet specific end-client criteria. Processing of mass customised rebalancing is facilitated by VISION’s elastic cloud computing capabilities. 8. Pre-trade Compliance Any orders to be implemented can be simulated and pre-trade checks can be performed to ensure compliance with regulatory (e.g. MiFID and FIDLEG), investment and risk guidelines. (These guidelines would have been observed in constructing the composites and models as well as during any customisations but are checked again immediately prior to execution.) 9. Implementation Once final approvals are given, the orders are sent to marketplaces for execution after aggregating where appropriate. Orders may also be routed to the prevailing OMS or core banking system where this makes sense. Trades based upon block orders can be split and allocated to the proper accounts.
10. Middle and Back Office When transactions are booked into a core banking or an enterprise data management system they can be retrieved and a reconciliation can be performed. Overnight processes can ensure regulatory, investment and risk compliance. Reports can be prepared and sent to preconfigured user lists on an automatic basis to support the controlling and audit functions. 11. Systematic / Rules Based Management Portfolios which have been constructed with systematic elements / rules (workflows, strategies etc.) will be monitored within the system and proposed orders will be generated according to the rules. These orders will be passed to the portfolio managers for initial review and approval before being sent further for pre-trade compliance and then execution. This provides a high degree of automation. 12. Client Portal Information about the portfolio can be provided to a client portal where clients can view reports and interactively analyse their accounts.
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7. Introducing Trendrating Key business facts: Founded 2013 HQ Address Via Cantonale 19 6900 Lugano Switzerland Company Size 11-50 employees Website www.trendrating.com Regional Presence North America, Western Europe
Company overview
Thought leader
The founders of Trendrating have 25 years of experience in building models and software for asset and wealth managers, with a successful track record of providing innovative, world class solutions. The core team includes a seasoned group of passionate developers, mathematicians, and quants. Trendrating has become the leader in Trend Capture models, analytics and technology serving 100+ institutions globally. We cover more than 20,000 instruments including stocks, ETFs, commodities and currencies on a global scale.
Rocco Pellegrinelli, Founder & CEO at Trendrating
Our unique proprietary rating methodology has the ability to identify and score the prevailing price trend of a security with high accuracy. The ability to distinguish between securities based on their respective price trend should be of paramount importance to every portfolio manager, no matter the investment strategy type. At Trendrating; we serve professional investors that strive for constant improvement and aim at delivering superior value, thereby understanding the importance of not missing opportunities offered by the new generation of data and advanced technology that are in tune with an evolving world. Our key strategic partners include Bloomberg and Euronext.
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Email: r.pellegrinelli@trendrating.net
Rocco Pellegrinelli began his career as a portfolio manager, and he has been a successful entrepreneur in the technology sector for the past 20 years. He created Brainpower in 1996 and as Chairman and CEO, established it as one of the top portfolio management systems globally. After taking the company public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2000, Brainpower was acquired by Bloomberg in 2006. His vision is encapsulated by the view that “Many analytical tools makes sense, but do they also make money? It is time to bring real value to fund managers.” Rocco believes that the asset and wealth management industry needs to evolve toward higher standards of value to clients, efficiency and cost effectiveness, therefore adopting new data and sophisticated tools is seen as the only solution. Rocco launched Trendrating with the mission to provide innovative analytics and technology that deliver alpha in a measurable, actionable and repeatable way. In response to Trendrating’s success, Rocco has been nominated by Industry Tech Outlook as one of the “10 Most Inspiring CEOs to Watch in 2020”.
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*Q&A Rocco Pellegrinelli What is your view on the current state of the market with regards to how wealth managers are managing their investment portfolios. What are they doing well, what are the challenges and what areas could be improved? In our views for 2020 we outlined a heightened pressure on profitability that is forcing asset and wealth managers to look harder for opportunities to reduce operating costs without impacting the quality of investment capabilities. At the same time, surveys indicate that clients are seeking a broader service, beyond where to invest their wealth, whilst demanding a more sophisticated digital experience. With these critical factors in mind, having the ability to extract intelligence from data, technology and digital tools will continue to play a pivotal role in adapting to these changing conditions and expectations; especially relevant in a post-Covid world. Using technology within the wealth management process can help avoid a number of the pitfalls of individual judgement and behavioral drawbacks that have negatively impacted investment processes over the years. These include biases, tendency to forecast and the disposition effect - tendency of managers to sell assets that have increased in value, while keeping assets that have dropped in value. In addition, and in particular for fundamentally driven processes, the ability to perform a disciplined sanity check of investment decisions can significantly reduce the need for subjective interpretation and inconsistency. We believe there remains an extraordinary opportunity for wealth managers to deliver strong performance on a consistent basis. This is because of the performance dispersion seen across most markets, sectors and industries. Performance dispersion is the difference
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At Trendrating, our data and analytics are complementary to other sources such as fundamental and quantitative data. We provide an edge that can help ride medium to long term bull trends and avoid the damage associated with bear trends. There is substantial evidence to show that identifying trends at an early stage, both uptrends and downtrends, can help significantly improve risk-adjusted returns. Therefore, our proposition is mission critical - it is the core of an investment management business.
between the best and worst performers within any given investment universe. The dispersion of returns is often overlooked and has been exacerbated amid the global pandemic as price trends are getting stronger and increasingly disconnected from underlying fundamentals. In periods of high dispersion, wealth managers equipped with the right tools have more opportunities to generate excess returns above the index or the benchmark.
While technologies can help expand the investment toolkit, in order to facilitate a broader adoption of technology in the wealth management market it is critical to be able to offer a seamless integration into the wealth management workflow. The use of investment technology should also extend into tangible operational efficiencies such as providing enhanced revenue capabilities, while reducing costs and risks to the business.
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Due to the changing nature of the investment markets adding to the increasing complexity, uncertainty and volatility of our current environment, there is a great need for new tools and approaches to traditional investment and risk management processes. In response, there is a growing number of technologies and advanced analytics tools that are unfortunately not being adopted fast enough because of personal fears of disruption and being rendered obsolete in the eyes of clients. In an environment of accelerating change, we believe this is the time to be forward-looking and brave in experimenting and trying new approaches to complement the current methodology.
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*Q&A Rocco Pellegrinelli The active management of equity portfolios and funds has been facing increasing challenges over the past years. According to statistics, 88% of all domestic stock fund managers had underperformed the broad S&P Composite 1500 Index over the past 15 years. (S&P SPIVA Report) This is mostly because of a lack of attention to what drives performance the most regardless of any given investment style; which is actual price trends. Price trends are driven by large institutional money flows that are often influenced by a complexity of factors which includes everyday global information we receive such as the news and macro-economic factors, as well as political events worldwide and other channels such as social media. Generating superior and sustainable performance in this difficult environment bring a particular challenge to active managers which mostly focus on old school approaches. The only solution is the adoption of model driven, proven, alternative data and advanced analytics that provides a better synchronization with fundamentals in the decision-making process. Trendrating is the result of strong passion and a dream to develop the best trend capture model for medium to long term equity investors. Our team with more than 25 years of experience in building first class fin-tech systems developed what today is the leading provider of trend capture models; Trendrating. Our proprietary pattern recognition model has been back tested for a 20 years period, covers over 15K instruments and has been delivering consistent accuracy to thousands of portfolio managers worldwide since it went live in 2014. Our mission is to deliver alpha in a measurable actionable that is dependable and repeatable, and enable wealth managers
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and advisors to offer intelligent, profitable active portfolio management raising the service quality and added value to end clients rather just buying passive products. We provide wealth managers with innovative analytics and tools to stay on top of price trend developments improving returns and reducing the risks for end clients. Trendrating developed a unique proprietary methodology to rate trends where (A) and (B) rated stocks on average outperform those rated (C) and (D). We also introduced a new, critical metric to assess the quality and the risks of a portfolio. It is possible to rate a whole portfolio based on the exposure to individual uptrends vs downtrends. A portfolio rating of (A-) and (B+) signals that most of the stocks in the portfolio are trending up. On the other hand, an aggregated portfolio rating of (B-) or below is warning the manager that there is a big exposure to stocks trending down. Obviously the higher the rating, the better the performance in the following months. The lower the rating, the higher the risk of losses. The solution is a powerful complement to the existing analytical process of active equity portfolio managers. As of the high increase on the demand for alternative data, we recently came out with a new solution; The Trendrating Systematic Management Solution (‘SMS’). Our SMS is a combination of our proprietary rating methodology; plus, our advanced testing and management platform. By applying the Trendrating Systematic Management Solution into your investment workflow, you can create a systematic process in which the primary driver is your existing investment process, benefitting from our first-class Trend Capture Model, added as an overlay. Our model, well-validated by more than 100 global clients, is specifically designed to improve the synchronization with actual trends for any
given investment universe. Importantly, our Trend Capture Model effectively discriminates between winners (A and B rated securities) and losers (C and D rated stocks) over a six to 18-month time horizon, delivering strong alpha capture and improving risk control. In summary, The Trendrating Systematic Management Solution facilitates the creation and the management of an innovative equity product, fully automated.
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Disrupt the balance of power. Raise your knowledge and skills. Empower yourself with the latest technology and last generation of intelligent analytics. Fill the performance gaps of asset and fund managers by providing increased value to end clients. Leverage state of art systems to contribute your own alpha in wealth management. The future of active advisory and management is here.
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What solution(s) does your company offer the market and how do they help wealth management firms manage their investment portfolios better?
Find out more about Trendrating
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For solution providers, The Wealth Mosaic is a global sales and marketing partner that supports their positioning, exposure and business development needs in a more complex world. Learn more about how TWM supports Solution Providers
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TWM Services The Wealth Mosaic offers an increasing range of services to help solution providers target market their products, services and insights to the global wealth and asset management sector. The key services are;
Marketing subscriptions
Content creation services
We offer engaging and enhanced business and solution profiles on our website which allow three different levels of content to be hosted. Solutions are featured in their respective business needs categories and content is promoted on our website and through our range of channels. For higher-tiered subscriptions enhanced features include analytics and business lead data, as well as discounts and priority access to TWM reports and projects.
Not only can we host and amplify your own content but we can also support you in creating insightful, relevant and professional content which includes:
Marketing+ service For those solution providers that want more hands-on, cost-efficient and (market) knowledge-based support, we can provide a retained marketing support service to help you in the planning, execution and impact of your marketing needs. We can help you create a plan, take advantage of the full range of our services and access our market knowledge and partners to create maximum impact and engagement.
Additional services We can also support you through events & roundtables, talks & presentations, research & consulting, capital raising support and through our UK sales accelerator service.
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Video creation
2-hour talking heads session that enables you to inform the market of key developments, news, product/service innovation in an engaging way.
Report participation
We create a range of reports each year to educate and inform the global wealth management sector on key developments. Past reports include; The Swiss Wealth Technology Landscape Report, the UK Wealth Technology Landscape Report and Using Technology to Engage with Clients.
Get in touch To find out more about any of our services, please feel free to get in touch. Give us a call: +44 20 3026 1587 Send us an email: office@thewealthmosaic.com
Webinars
We have a channel on BrightTALK where we produce webinars and podcasts to maximize our reach as it has an online community of 8m professionals that engage with 100k+ online talks.
Articles, blogs, interviews and white papers
Through our team of experienced journalists TWM can create articles, blogs, interviews and white papers to enable you to create new engaging content for the market.
Factsheets
We can create short factsheets on your solutions to enable you to explain concisely to the market what your solution offers the market.
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Investor Connect Service Helping companies reach global investors to fund innovation & growth. As part of The Wealth Mosaic’s mission to help connect all parts of the global wealth management eco-system we are now providing an investor connect service to help companies engage with investors to enable them to source capital to build and grow their businesses to meet the significant opportunities in the global wealth management sector.
Investor Network
Company Criteria
TWM has access to a growing international network of over 1,500 investors interested in AI & Machine Learning, Blockchain/DLT, Crypto-currencies, Cyber Security, and Wealth/FinTech, which comprises individuals (senior business executives and entrepreneurs), VC’s, Corporate VC’s, private equity firms and family offices. This range of investors means the right type of investors can be approached depending on the size and stage of the funding round.
TWM can help find investors on funding rounds starting from £500k (post-seed) up to £50m (series A+) and seeks to work with companies with the following criteria; The Company is a technology-led business targetting the wealth and asset management sector Experienced management teams with strong track records
Service Overview
Revenue generating (i.e. post-seed) upwards
The Investor Connect Service includes;
High quality existing investors
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Large market opportunity
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Pre-Marketing review of the investor marketing collateral Review on the most appropriate investors to approach on the funding round, including investors that could provide a strategic benefit to the business Comprehensive marketing exercise to the chosen targeted investors. Any investors that are interested in investing will be introduced to the Company to take forward.
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Get in touch If you are a company seeking to raise £500k or more and already have investors committing to your funding round, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Give us a call: +44 20 3026 1587 Send us an email: simon@thewealthmosaic.com
Funding round is already open, and commitments are already in place from credible investors.
Cost TWM charges a small fee to conduct the premarketing review and then only receives a fee if we successfully introduce investors that invest in your funding round.
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TWM Report Programme To inform and engage the global wealth management sector on an on-going basis TWM creates a range of reports These reports highlight which solution providers sell in particular territories (Landscape Reports), as well reports on topics and themes that enable solution providers to showcase clearly how their solutions solve particular business needs (WealthTech Views Reports). The completed and scheduled reports for 2020 and early 2021 are shown below;
Landscape Reports
Publication Date
WealthTech Views Reports
Publication Date
UK Wealth Technology Landscape Report, 2019 (click here to read)
Q2 2019
Looking into 2020 (click here to read)
Q1 2020
Swiss Wealth Technology Landscape Report, 2020 (click here to read)
Q1 2020
Using technology to engage clients (click here to read)
Q2 2020
UK WealthTech Landscape Report 2020
Q3 2020
How Blockchain is shaping the future of wealth management (click to read)
Q3 2020
US WealthTech Landscape Report 2020
Q1 2021
Using technology to better manage client portfolios
Q4 2020
APAC WealthTech Landscape Report 2020
Q2 2021
RegTech for wealth managers: focus, benefits & opportunities
Q1 2021
Global Family Office Technology Landscape Report
Q2 2021
Looking into 2021
Q1 2021
Swiss Wealth Technology Landscape Report, 2021
Q3 2021
The applications of AI and bigdata in wealth management
Q1 2021
UK Wealth Technology Landscape Report, 2021
Q3 2021
The evolving B2B digital investment (robo) market - unlocking the mass market
Q1 2021
Cybersecurity technology for wealth managers
Q2 2021
Client on-boarding technology
Q2 2021
Given the level of on-going innovation of technology and services to the wealth management sector, we are increasing the number of reports we create each year to cover the important themes we see in the market and highlight solution providers that are aiming to be leaders in their specific areas of expertise.
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Find out more about our Report Programme
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Business Needs ~ Technology & Data Technology & Data solutions are increasingly crucial to the efficient and successful delivery of wealth management services. As the diverse demands on the business of wealth management have grown year-on-year, and themes like digitalisation have become more embedded into the sector's operational and strategic mindset, so the realm of Technology & Data solutions has moved centre stage. Alongside that, whether in new solutions or the adaptation of existing solutions, there is now an unprecedented level of development in the number, type and focus of Technology & Data solutions targeted at the business needs of wealth management firms and their clients. Our Technology & Data marketplace is a dedicated, focused, engaging and growing resource of over 4,000 solutions, 1,500 solution providers and many knowledge resources relevant to the Technology & Data business needs of wealth managers across the globe.
Search the TWM directory
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Business Intelligence & Practice Management
Digital (Robo) Investing
Business Process Management & Outsourcing
Distributed Ledger Technologies & Cryptocurrencies
Client Communications & Reporting
Document Management & Storage
Client Engagement & Management
Investment Platforms & Tools
Client Marketing & Prospecting
Market & Business Infrastructure
Client Onboarding & Identity Verification
Financial & Retirement Planning
Compliance & Regulation
Portfolio Build, Analysis & Reporting
Core Banking
Portfolio & Wealth Management Systems
Cyber & Network Security
Risk Analysis & Management
Data Feeds & Information Sources
Software Development & Management
Data Management & Analysis
Technology Strategy & Consulting
Data Feeds & Information Sources
Tools for the Client (B2C)
Digital Platforms & Tools
Trading & Back Office
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The global digital marketplace & intelligence resource for the wealth management sector. #dedicatedtowealth
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The Wealth Mosaic Limited 22-25 Portman Close, London United Kingdom New Business: +44 20 3026 1587 Email: office@thewealthmosaic.com
Š The Wealth Mosaic Limited 2020