Citywire Wealth Manager: Leveraging technology - A practical guide

10 April 2017

Jaco Cebula, CTO at Multrees Investor Services, highlights the importance of wealth managers staying technically competitive and explains how organisations can encourage a culture of innovation.

The majority of the wealth managers we work with focus on relationship management to best cater to the needs of their high net worth clients. As a result, they often lack in-house technology experience. 

By outsourcing to technologically advanced investor services specialists, wealth managers can stay technically competitive, and focused on their clients.

During an economic downturn it is even more important for finance and technology firms to continue to encourage and invest in innovation through technology. After all, innovation is driving growth across all industries and helping organisations to achieve a competitive edge.

Encouraging innovation within an organisation comes down to providing employees with the opportunity to put forward ideas. An office can have a space dedicated to discussing ideas. This ‘innovation hub’ promotes a form of ‘internal crowdsourcing’ where people will naturally gravitate towards the best ideas.

There has to be an understanding that there is quite a high attrition rate for new ideas, but businesses should not be ‘afraid to fail’, or to express ideas which may not survive. In fact, a ‘failed’ idea can be the catalyst for something even greater, helping to generate a new or improved vision for the business.

Who can select the best tech…

The best type of innovation is tailored to the industry voice and client needs. We are seeing additional demand within the development of Web APIs. Primarily used for providing a new mechanism to interact with other organisations, Web application programming interfaces (APIs) provide a business-to-business level of integration. They involve leveraging a number of cutting-edge technologies, but in doing so provide an opportunity to demonstrate technological capability. 

By introducing a public interface into your services, you become placed, technically, in the shop window for other businesses to integrate their products to you. 

This allows businesses to partner with other innovative software vendors and services and provide true end-to-end integration across a number of application technology stacks. Developing a Web API provides some of our more tech-savvy clients with a new way of integrating their business processes with us.

Tailored tech: a client example

Tailored tech is built to an organisation’s requirements and suited to the client-focused nature of the business. Recently, a client chose to focus their technology innovation specifically in the digital client delivery area. Rather than recruiting a large team of developers, they partnered with us to deliver their branded single sign-on, secure portal solution.

Recognising that they needed to be more sophisticated with their client information, which is held on our investment administration and custody platform, the client did not want an out-of-the-box option. 

We worked with them to deliver a tailored solution geared towards their specific and immediate needs. This included the benefit of full Web API integration to the custody, reporting and related services provided from our services platform.