“With the market demanding more personalised digital experiences in wealth management and improved ALM tools, underscoring the need for financial institutions to enhance their analytical capabilities and meet evolving client needs to stay competitive, we have evolved our core product such that KidbrookeONE addresses these needs, and more besides.”
For this issue of TWMTT, we talked to Fredrik Daveus, CEO and Co-Founder at Kidbrooke, about the launch of KidbrookeONE, which marks a significant development in their product offering.
Before we start, could you share a bit more about yourself, your career to date, and your role at Kidbrooke?
I am the Founder and CEO of Kidbrooke. I was born and raised in the north of Stockholm. I went on to study at the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, where I gained MSc degrees in Computer Science and Finance. My professional journey took off at LF Asset Management as Head of Risk Management, which laid the foundational stones of my expertise in strategic risk assessment and analytics.
I then moved to London in 2004, where I sharpened my skills as a quantitative analyst for prominent investment banks, a role that spanned almost seven years. In 2011 I went on to establish Kidbrooke, initially envisioned as a consulting firm. By 2019, recognising the transformative potential of technology in finance, we guided Kidbrooke through a significant pivot towards tech. Today, Kidbrooke is renowned for its Cloud-native platform that utilises data-driven analytics, offering personalised financial planning and advice.
The launch of KidbrookeONE marks a significant development in your product offerings. Could you share the rationale behind the rebranding to 'KidbrookeONE'?
As the financial industry evolves, so do we. Since our start in 2011, Kidbrooke® has been at the forefront of financial technology innovation within the wealth analytics space. In 2019, we pivoted from a quantitative finance consulting business to a software firm focused on developing the OutRank financial simulation engine, a cloud-based API-first financial planning and advice analytics-as-a-service solution. OutRank offered a comprehensive approach, combining asset and liability management with Monte Carlo simulations to provide interactive, forward-looking financial analytics. It set a new standard in the industry, making complex financial concepts accessible to thousands through our customers.
The transition from OutRank, the financial simulation engine, to KidbrookeONE, our Unified Investment and Wealth Analytics platform, addresses critical industry trends, including the demand for efficient data management processes, the need for more personalised digital experiences in wealth management and improved ALM (Asset and Liability Management) tools in investment and asset management. These trends underscore financial institutions need to improve their analytical capabilities to remain competitive, meet evolving client needs and be ready for increased regulatory demands.
How would you characterise the KidbrookeONE platform in terms of its capabilities and the specific challenges it solves?
KidbrookeONE provides solutions for each of the stages of your digital transformation journey. It builds upon a solid foundation of market and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data management via instrument and portfolio analysis and on to our leading financial simulation engine. Incorporating key features from our well-known OutRank solution, and introducing new, advanced capabilities ranging from the efficient management of market and investment product data to wealth analytics capabilities such as portfolio analysis, performance calculation, and portfolio construction.
At its core, KidbrookeONE is designed to bring unparalleled efficiency and consistency to investment and wealth managers’ operations. This is achieved through a unified approach between data and analytics that integrates financial planning and asset management aspects into a coherent system. This ensures a uniform quality and accuracy of advice or decision support, whether delivered by humans or a digital platform. Its core features include robust performance, forward-looking and retrospective wealth analytics, an architecture which does not require the storage of end-customer data, and an API-first design for seamless integration. It is auditable and modular, focusing on business and customer needs.
Does a potential client need to be at a particular stage of the digitalisation process to utilise the KidbrookeONE platform effectively in their operations?
We’ve developed a digital transformation framework that is applicable to both asset management and financial planning sectors. This three-tiered approach begins with the Data Management step, the foundational stage where financial institutions organise and streamline their data, often addressing legacy system challenges. We can help clients turn highly manual and error-prone data management processes into lean and efficient automated streams that can help you mitigate identified risks in your operations. Now, KidbrookeONE offers a suite of solutions, including market, ESG and product data aggregation and management (both forward-looking for asset managers and retrospective and forward-looking for financial planners), generation of economic scenarios, historical returns analysis, and maintenance of specific rules pertinent to financial journeys like pensions and tax considerations, all underpinned by a stateless architecture and API-first approach.
The next phase addresses the modernisation of answering financial queries. For instance, within wealth management, pension and estate planning the methods of answering common queries might differ. Similarly, in asset management, teams may work independently of each other. KidbrookeONE ensures a seamless flow between the different customer journeys, bolstering them with consistent wealth analytics backed by our ultramodern technology.
The final stage, “Omni-Channel Business,” is where KidbrookeONE really shines by ensuring a uniform calculation method across different sales channels and customer experiences. For both asset managers and financial planners, this phase introduces comprehensive financial planning capabilities, encapsulating the full spectrum of customer needs. KidbrookeONE also offers significant benefits for asset managers, including consistent reporting and analysis across multiple platforms, as well as integrated data management capabilities.
Could you provide insights into how your clients have successfully implemented KidbrookeONE in creating or enhancing their digital financial journeys, particularly highlighting any transformative impacts observed?
Our customers, including prominent financial institutions like Skandia and leading Swedish insurance broker Max Matthiessen, have effectively leveraged KidbrookeONE to enhance their digital transformation journeys within our structured framework.
Skandia, established in 1855, utilised KidbrookeONE to transition from a traditional wealth manager to an omnichannel, digitally empowered market leader. Skandia leverages KidbrookeONE's analytical capabilities to power comprehensive retirement savings advice and investment guidance journeys. The partnership enabled Skandia to build sophisticated and consistent financial experiences designed for multiple sales channels that reflect intricate tax rules, customer risk and sustainability preferences, and compliance requirements. KidbrookeONE's robust and flexible service significantly reduced time-to-market for new products and services, facilitating Skandia's vision of delivering consistent, high-quality financial advice across multiple channels.
Similarly, our partnership with Max Matthiessen underscores the platform's versatility in enriching investment and wealth data analytics capabilities. By integrating KidbrookeONE, Max Matthiessen has significantly upgraded its mutual fund information delivery across self-service and advised channels. The solution provides a comprehensive view of investment products, including sustainability aspects, ensuring efficient management of mutual funds and model portfolios. This collaboration has enabled Max Matthiessen to offer clearer fund descriptions to investors, particularly highlighting sustainability factors, thus ensuring a seamless and impactful digital transformation aligned with their strategic goals.
In a landscape where several solutions offer support in crafting digital journeys and analytical insights for financial institutions, how does KidbrookeONE distinguish itself from similar offerings in the market?
Kidbrooke® distinguishes itself through its commitment to realistic, comprehensive, and scalable financial modelling and analysis. By developing a sophisticated economic scenario generator, a flexible cash flow model, and leveraging powerful AI-based data processing, we can offer an exceptionally accurate and realistic forecasting platform. This foundation enables our analytical tools to handle complex financial data and incorporate clients’ house views, setting it apart from competitors that might not offer such in-depth economic and financial modelling.
Kidbrooke®'s holistic approach to financial planning is another differentiator. Unlike many solutions that focus on isolated aspects of a customer's finances, Kidbrooke®'s platform covers the entire customer balance sheet, including investments, credit, pensions, insurance, and tax, and provides both forward-looking and backwards-looking analysis. This comprehensive view, combined with the platform's proven scalability and reliability in delivering millions of forecasts and decision-support outputs to a broad range of customers and advisors annually, positions Kidbrooke® as a uniquely consistent and trustworthy partner for financial institutions seeking to offer sophisticated and personalised financial planning and advisory services.
Looking ahead, what is your strategic vision for Kidbrooke®?
Aligned with our vision of contributing to a world where educated financial decision-making is available to everyone, KidbrookeONE and the accompanying analytical evolution framework democratise access to sophisticated wealth analytics through our customers. We empower financial institutions of all sizes to provide informed and reliable financial guidance to their clients, contributing to a more financially literate and empowered society.
The launch of KidbrookeONE marks a pivotal moment in our journey. We are grateful for our clients’ and partners’ continued trust and support. We are excited about the future as we continue to innovate and support the financial community.
About Kidbrooke
Kidbrooke builds seamless wealth experiences leveraging predictive forecasting by accessing our financial simulation engine through its versatile APIs.
By distilling decades of research in quantitative finance and behavioural economics into easily accessible APIs, Kidbrooke empowers banks, insurers, and wealth managers to build next-generation investments, pensions, and wealth experiences. We provide KidbrookeOne, a complete investment and wealth analytics platform designed to improve customer and adviser experiences as well as increase the efficiency of investment and wealth operations.
We believe in a world where everyone has access to educated financial decision-making.
For more information on Kidbrooke, visit: www.kidbrooke.com
