In a world dominated by technical innovation, organisations that gather FinTech data and disseminate it have powerful voices in terms of thought leadership.
One of the leading organisations is Capgemini, a French consulting firm that provides great insights into the financial services industry.
Recently, Capgemini published an excellent paper focusing on the Top Trends in Wealth Management 2020. At PortfolioMetrix we like to compare ourselves against the best, so we looked at how we stack up on the nine trends listed in the paper. We concluded that we are on track with all of them but well ahead of the curve on six of them.
These are:
Sustainable Investing
Three years ago, we launched our Ethical Emphasis range of funds because, listening to our adviser partners, we could see that this was an issue that was becoming increasingly important to their clients.
The key features of our Ethical range are:
- A focus on achieving a positive social and environmental impact without sacrificing clients’ financial objectives.
- Investing in securities that strongly benefit society and seek to improve the behaviour of the companies that are featured in the portfolios.
- Choosing funds that explicitly avoid investing in companies whose business models are misaligned with sustainability principles.
Ever since its inception we’ve been continually evolving our ethical solution to be even more relevant to investors wanting to increase their efforts to help improve and save the planet. We’ll be producing a guide to our Responsible Investing policy soon which will provide more details.
Demographic shift and intergenerational wealth transfer
The Capgemini report highlights that many advisers are not ready to manage the wealth transfer between generations and that around four out of five beneficiaries will switch away from the original adviser.
Our adviser partners are well placed to service the needs of the younger generations who tend not to have significant amounts to invest. This is because we don’t have a minimum investment size and can offer a fully customised solution for any client, regardless of the size of their assets.
Being able to offer this means that our partners can set up relationships with the children of their clients, making it far more likely they will retain this business in the future.
Seamless Customer Engagement
Our WealthExplorer™ tool is integral to the PortfolioMetrix experience and drives seamless customer engagement. It allows advisers to analyse clients’ needs efficiently, customise portfolios specifically for them and then manage their investments on an ongoing basis.
Hyper-personalised services
Personalised portfolios are synonymous with PortfolioMetrix – they sit at the heart of our proposition. We’ve noticed increased commentary in the press recently about “mass customisation” or “scalable bespoke”. Whatever you choose to call it we have been leading the way on this trend for a decade now.
Emotional Analytics
Behavioural finance has always featured strongly in our financial personality assessment tool and it provides far greater insights than a standard risk profiler. Above all, it helps our adviser partners understand their clients’ emotional reaction to investing. Using this information, our adviser partners are better placed to coach clients to make financial decisions that are not driven by emotion and to maintain their composure during volatile times.
APIs foster innovation
For the past decade we have been vociferous about using APIs to enable us to connect with platforms and to be able to monitor our multiple portfolio permutations. We are seeing encouraging progress on this front, which is great news for both our adviser partners and their clients.
Ahead of the curve
It’s reassuring that we are already aligned with so many of the trends featured in the Capgemini paper. This is a great validation of our long-held belief that we are operating on the cutting edge of our industry and that positions PortfolioMetrix, our adviser partners and their clients well for the future.
