Jay Kim
Bhaskar Prabhakara is the co-founder and CEO of WeInvest, a Singapore-based digital wealth management solutions provider, helping banks, brokers, and wealth managers launch a full-suite digital investing experience for their relationship managers and customers.
The startup also operates in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and the UAE. Earlier this year, it raised US$12 million in a series A round.
Prabhakara talks about the business model, how their solutions work, and their future plans.
How did you become an entrepreneur?
I grew up in India. After finishing my engineering degree and MBA, I worked in banking. And then, I moved into consulting, working with Charles Schwab, Reuters, Goldman Sachs, and so on.
I spent almost eight years in London before moving to Singapore in 2012. I led the Asian business of Headstrong, where I helped build businesses from scratch, working with a lot of capital markets organizations to move brick-and-mortar models into digital.
Then, it occurred to me that I’d been building businesses for others. I thought, “Why don’t I try to do it for myself? Besides, wealth seemed like a very personal problem.”
So, in 2014, we embarked on building WeInvest.
Who are the people behind WeInvest?
We have three co-founders. Rajesh Arjunlal Jaisingh is the COO. He set up business operations for HSBC and Lehman Brothers in India. He also had a startup stint with an ad exchange called PubMatic. He was in the US when we touched base and talked about what we were going to do.
Aananth Solaiyappan is our CTO who was also CTO at WeLend for about three and a half years. Before that, he was with Standard Chartered, Oracle, and Amazon. Aananth and I got introduced through a mutual friend.
What exactly does your company do?
WeInvest basically focuses on making investing easier for a mass market investor or an emerging affluent investor. We also build different solutions for high-net-worth individuals who use a relationship manager. Our products include GrowWealth (a robo-advisory-as-a-service platform) and AdviseWealth (an RM-assisted-advisory platform).
We white label these digital wealth platforms for banks, brokers, asset managers, and insurance companies. So, we are not a direct B2C business. What we’ve built is an entire stack of not just technology but also investment strategies and the operations to support a wealth management business. We’re managing the whole platform on the cloud.
Tell us about the user experience.
We have enabled multiple journeys. Let’s say you’re a not-so-sophisticated investor and a newbie to investing. You could go on the platform and set up your goal, go through risk profiling or choose a risk profile, and then get a recommendation of an investment portfolio that suits you.
