A startup helps financial institutions build digital wealth products within six months

From gold and stocks to art, wine, and even comic books, investment products come in all shapes, sizes, and values. If you have a bit of money available, putting it in a worthwhile investment is almost always a wise move.

Financial institutions (FI) can help with that, or at least they try to. Wealth management is a very traditional sector, and existing tools tend to have limited functionality.

To solve this problem, Bhaskar Prabhakara and his co-founders set up WeInvest in 2015.

Photo credit: WeInvest

WeInvest is a digital advisory platform service for banks, brokers, asset managers, and financial advisors. The Singapore-based startup develops tools to help these professionals engage their clients, plan and monitor investment, and analyze portfolio performance. On top of that, WeInvest runs these tools for FIs as partners.

Their tools include: TrackWealth, a simplified account aggregation tool that allows a bank’s clients to consolidate their financial assets; GrowWealth, a full-suite investment advisory and execution platform; and AdviseWealth, which enables advisors to provide more meaningful and effective client engagements with in-depth tools.

WeInvest’s tools come at an opportune time: customers, asset managers, and financial advisors alike are increasingly turning to online operations. According to a 2016 survey by Ernst & Young, most wealth clients consider digital their preferred channel for receiving advice and are familiar with robo-advisory products. High net worth individuals also prefer going digital, with 70% inclined towards that option.

Retail banks, private banks, brokerages, and insurance companies are not foreign to digital wealth management tools. However, to build up these capabilities, there are major hurdles to cross.

One is that banks are constrained by legacy issues. Prabhakara explains that innovations within banks tend to advance in incremental episodes, each with solutions that serve very specific purposes at given points in time.

For example, mobile banking was introduced to solve the shortcomings of online banking, which in turn was introduced to address problems with traditional forms of banking.

While each solution works individually, they don’t always work well together. Now, imagine piling on even more capabilities, like a digital wealth management platform. Besides the complexities involved, building new platforms from scratch can take years, at best, to complete.

As such, partnerships – like the arrangement WeInvest has with its clients – make more sense. WeInvest has a suite of user-centric tools on hand while FIs have existing data, customer relationships, and core systems. Together, they offer better, more comprehensive services to customers. WeInvest is the “faster, external IT arm of financial institutions,” Prabhakara explains.

“We are not constrained by legacy products,” he continues. “We are very current with the technological landscape. We can do things faster than a normal financial institution. We already have the products and expertise available, so that they don’t have to spend years learning and developing new tools. The depth and breadth of what we have is just not what banks can build today.”

The right place at the right time

Prabhakara freely admits that WeInvest is neither the first nor the only company to simplify wealth management. Without naming names, he reveals that a number of tech startups are vying for a piece of the pie, not to mention the larger existing FIs in Europe, North America, and China.

A switcheroo