Brought to you by Morningstar ByAllAccounts
Wealthtech startups are transforming the fast-paced industry of financial management, and competition is fierce. Join this VB Spotlight event to delve into key industry trends and the crucial fintech tools and strategies that can keep you ahead of the curve.
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Wealthtech, the fintech subset that offers personal finance, investing, and wealth management, is an evolutionary step for the financial services industry. Tools like robotic advisors, digital wealth management platforms, and online investment platforms are changing the way consumers think about their money and the way financial managers interact with their clients. As a descendant of the digital age, the industry also sees constant waves of innovation that shake the market again and again.
“Staying ahead of these trends can be challenging as technology becomes more sophisticated and data quality becomes an essential competitive differentiator for the success of wealth tech startups,” says Don. McHenry, a senior product manager for Morningstar ByAllAccounts.
A growing emphasis on data
One of the most significant trends in wealth management platforms is the increasing emphasis on data. To function effectively, these platforms require interoperable data across the entire technology stack, advisor and investor workflows, and back office operations. Ensuring data consistency reduces costs, requires less manual intervention, and leads to happier customers.
“There has been an explosion of solutions and platforms specialized in heritage technology, which has been a great advance for the industry”, says McHenry. “It allowed companies to integrate best-in-class solutions from multiple vendors, resulting in greater functionality and flexibility, and more ways to scale their practice by bringing that stack together. And leveraging these specialized solutions has allowed advisors to focus on core competencies.”
The trend is a positive step forward, but it also highlights how central data is to wealth management platforms.
“Whatever the advisor sees should be the same as what the client sees and what the back-office team sees,” he explains. “The back office team is an often overlooked stakeholder, but it’s important that data be interoperable not only for external users, but also for internal users.”
Since wealth managers use a plethora of specialized providers, ease of integration also becomes crucial. Integrations have become a real problem for businesses, so it’s critical that wealth tech companies partner with vendors that have the proven capability and track record to back them up. It’s not just about finding vendors that offer ease of integration, although that’s certainly important. It’s about finding vendors who have the experience to navigate complex integrations smoothly, reducing costs, minimizing manual intervention, and avoiding errors.
The power of use case specific data
Use-case specific data, or data that has been formatted and prepared for the purpose of powering discrete solutions, is incredibly important. Save costs, increase customer satisfaction and more. Scope, quality and delivery are the most important factors, says McHenry.
“When it comes to outreach, it’s important for WealthTechs to get a complete view of their client’s assets, including hard-to-reach accounts,” he says. “Broad coverage of these data sources, and long tail, should be paramount when selecting a financial data aggregation partner, to provide that complete and holistic view of a client’s assets.”
When it comes to quality, data must not only be complete and accurate, but it must also be enriched to make it actionable. This means that when choosing a supplier it is important to understand what they specialize in and which markets they serve. Many providers have specific areas of focus, such as payments or credit decisions or portfolio management. Understanding that specialty and the markets it serves will give you a better idea of the enrichment they offer and the quality of data you can expect.
Finally, the delivery of data must be adapted to a format that is compatible with the receiving system. Partnering with data providers with use-case-specific tools reduces costs for the receiving platform by shaping the data to meet its specific requirements. “It’s also important that it doesn’t just happen once. An established feedback loop between the data provider and the receiving platform means delivery is continually optimized,” says McHenry.
Portfolio analytics is driving personalization
Portfolio analysis plays a crucial role in achieving personalized investing and personalized advice at scale. By enriching investment positions with actionable data points, it provides the visibility needed to optimize asset allocation, reduce risk, lower costs, and diversify portfolios. It also contextualizes retained accounts, ensuring that holdings align with the client’s risk tolerance and are tax efficient enough. This approach enables personalized advice at scale.
“Enriched and aggregated data helps provide transparency into a portfolio’s composition, allowing wealth managers to make personalized recommendations,” says McHenry.
To learn more about the ways data quality impacts wealth tech startups, how to ensure your business is at the forefront of the financial management industry, the biggest trends coming your way, and more, don’t miss this VB Spotlight event!
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Diary
– Top 5 trends in wealth technology for 2023
– Why high-quality use case-specific data is crucial for technology-rich applications and solutions
– How to accelerate innovation with tight integration of aggregated data
– Why best-in-class market data is key to staying competitive
– And more!
presenters
- Cane ColleyCEO and Co-Founder of Summit Wealth
- Don McHenry,Product Management, Morningstar ByAllAccounts
- greg milesModerator, VentureBeat
