Opening Objectway’s fifth customer conference on 14 April in Sorrento, its Group CEO Luigi Marciano referenced the town’s famous lemon groves that exist because of a centuries-old grafting technique: a lemon branch onto a bitter orange root – combining the resilience of one with the productivity of the other. The financial industry's challenge now, he said, is not to generate more ideas, but to graft innovation onto foundations strong enough to sustain and scale it.

Themed "Grafting innovation, cultivating success”, the conference drew wealth and asset managers, custodians, banking executives, and consultants from across Europe and beyond. Attendees heard that competitive advantage will not come from isolated initiatives: firms must instead combine strong operational foundations, intelligent use of AI, and collaborative ecosystems with trusted partnerships that leverage scalable sourcing strategies to manage growing complexity and evolve with client needs.

Key themes from the two days of sessions, panels, client case studies, and research presentations included:

• The era of innovation as posturing – the lab, the pilot, the proof of concept that never shipped – is over.
• Scalability has become the new strategic imperative: growth now means increasing revenue, service, and reach without adding complexity, cost, or risk at the same pace.
• Strong foundations win: firms that simplify processes, modernise architecture, improve data quality, and automate core operations are those best positioned to innovate profitably.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) is an amplifier, not a shortcut: its value is realised only when layered onto trusted data, governed workflows, and resilient operating models.
• No firm scales alone: the future belongs to tailored ecosystems built through partnership, orchestration, and continuous evolution around client needs.

Scalability – leaders and followers

Hannah Freegard, Deputy Editorial Director at FT Longitude, presented findings from a survey of 300 senior financial services decision-makers, conducted in partnership with Objectway. The research introduced a ‘scalability index’ splitting respondents into leaders and followers across two dimensions: the ability to scale profitably client services and onboarding, as well as core operations. What separated the two groups was not ambition or investment levels, but the sequence of their transformation programmes.

Scalability leaders, Freegard explained, followed a pattern: get the data right and the core operations clean; use externalisation strategically to accelerate; finally, layer AI on top as an amplifier. Followers, by contrast, were still trying to reduce manual effort, bringing in external partners to relieve near-term pressure rather than enable long-term growth and foundational changes.

The commercial gap between the two was stark: leaders were far more likely to report profitability gains above 15 percent from scaling initiatives. In onboarding – cited by respondents as the biggest bottleneck to scalability – leaders had largely solved the problem, with 75 percent already deploying end-to-end, digitally enabled onboarding and account opening, versus only 34 percent among followers, who were still drowning in it.

Solution as a service

Objectway COO International, Alberto Cuccu, described a treatment plan. He called Objectway's proposition "solution as a service" – not pure SaaS in the commodity sense, but a composable, configurable model that standardises the foundations and differentiates on top.

Scale, he said, is not the same as growth: it means growing revenue without growing complexity, cost, or risk at the same pace – breaking the linear relationship between volume and operational overhead.

Firms that have found success in achieving true scale have a few things in common, Cuccu said:

• Composable architecture
• A disciplined adoption sequence
• The approach of standardising before applying differentiation.

He also spoke about the role of AI in achieving scale, viewing it as an amplifier rather than a strategy. He described an industry transition from "systems of operations" – the automated workflow foundations built over the last decade – toward "systems of action”, where AI agents execute processes autonomously, with humans supervising rather than doing.

AI stress-tests your infrastructure, Cuccu warned. If the foundations are weak, adding AI to them doesn't accelerate the business, it accelerates the failure.

The discipline behind the vision

Conference chair Leda Glyptis, author of the book Beyond Resilience: Patterns of Success in Fintech and Digital Transformation which examines success and failure across digital ventures, said successful ventures:

• Solve problems that are genuinely big enough to matter, not just interesting to their founders;
• Manage executive attention as carefully as budget – knowing that, inside a large organisation, the money rarely runs out but the headspace can;
• Work backwards from their internal budget cycles – rather than building a pure product roadmap and then being surprised when the CFO meeting landed badly; and
• Back their vision without leaving a door open to retreat.

To that last point, Glyptis cited Capital One which, in 2015, became the first major bank to go all-in on public cloud by switching off its mainframes entirely. “If you can roll back, you will roll back under pressure”, she argued. Not giving yourself that option is uncomfortable, but it's also what forces an organisation to go forward rather than retreat, she said.

She linked this to the “followers” in FT Longitude's research – still hedging, and placing greater emphasis to selective, punctual activities. The “leaders”, by contrast, had made the uncomfortable decision to commit decisively.

“Scale like a platform, style like a brand”

Edoardo Zavarella, principal consultant at Forrester, opened a thematic track on maintaining personalised services as they scale. He outlined “four pillars of customer experience” – personalisation, speed, proactivity, and self-service – which he said “should also be the principles that structure your efforts to rewrite your processes or acquire technology”.

Demographic change in wealth management should be viewed through evolving client behaviours, not just product demand, he argued – pointing to Forrester research that showed a shift from delegation towards more self-directed, digitally enabled investors.

Laura Faverzani, Objectway CEO Canada & Managing Director – Digital Client Management, explored personalisation further in a joint session with Simonetta Rigo, Chief Client Officer at Rathbones. Faverzani emphasised platform-based scalability, AI-enabled engagement, and the potential of seamless, omnichannel journeys. Rigo focused on combining human advisory with AI and how investing in data, digital design, and hyper-personalisation can enhance client and employee experience. Both stressed balancing efficiency and experience – “scale like a platform, style like a brand” – as Faverzani put it.

Objectway’s Business Development Director Nicola Pepè joined Zurich Bank Chief Operating Officer Omar Campana to discuss scalable innovation in the context of an advisory business. Pepè framed a shift from product-led to service-centric wealth management, where value comes from orchestrating advice, data, and client insight around three pillars – network, proposition, and platform.

Campana illustrated this through Zurich’s data-driven, platform-based model – combining advisory network, advanced analytics, and personalised services – arguing that technology enables advisers to deliver differentiated value as the business continues to evolve.

Building on the findings of research she had presented earlier at the event, Freegard moderated an afternoon panel which explored what separates scalability leaders from followers.

Stephanie Auge-Dickhut of Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen highlighted foundational enablers such as data quality, open architecture, and real-time processing. Paolo Magnani, Deputy Managing Director at Credem, described AI-driven advisory models supporting personalised client interactions. Maarten Lindner of Rabobank pointed to organisational complexity and legacy systems as constraints, while Objectway Director of Sales and Account Management Tariq Khan advocated modular platforms, partnership models, and AI as an “intelligence layer” that can enable scalable, client-centric innovation.

Scaling operational efficiency

In a keynote, Celent's Head of Wealth Management Ashley Longabaugh argued that front office innovation can only travel as far as the operating model beneath it allows. New products, digital onboarding, market expansion, and personalised service all depend on processes that can cope with volume, exceptions and regulation. In that sense, operations are where strategy either becomes reality or stalls.

Speaking on the topic of scaling though consolidation, Gianbattista Geroldi, CEO Italy for Objectway, and Andrea Cattaneo, Head of Italy, Switzerland & Iberia of BNP Paribas Securities Services, highlighted the “operational efficiency paradox” of balancing standardisation with customisation, and the role of partnership in building scalable platforms.

Consolidation requires standardised platforms, unified data models, and embedded governance to reduce complexity, said Objectway’s CEO for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland Karl im Brahm. ABN AMRO’s Country Operating Officer Eric Van Der Deijl illustrated this by describing a multi-year integration across Germany and Luxembourg – phased migration, gap analysis, and platform alignment – framing scalability as a continuous transformation journey balancing growth, regulation, and operational resilience.

After the case studies, Stephen Wall, founder of The Wealth Mosaic, led a panel discussion about how wealth management firms can practically achieve operational efficiency and resilience.

Standard Bank Group's head of offshore investments Charles Harper presented an ambitious plan to grow its client base from 3,500 to 60,000 across different jurisdictions. Nicola Morrison, Operations Director at Isle of Man investment services firm Ramsey Crookall, explained how they had modernised their processes to triple their onboarding capacity without hiring more staff.

Giving a macro perspective, Mauro Panebianco, Partner – Asset & Wealth Management EMEA Advisory Leader at PwC discussed the structural pressures facing the industry due to competition and consolidation. Alberto Cuccu of Objectway emphasised that scalability hinges on forming strong partnerships, implementing standardisation, and embracing change.

A route through complexity

Monitor Deloitte partner Manuel Pincetti warned against treating transformation as a technology project owned solely by IT. Successful change, he argued, requires business sponsorship, redesign of end-to-end processes, and structured change management from the outset rather than at go-live. Simply replacing systems without rethinking workflows risks moving cost rather than removing it.

Geroldi introduced a client case study of the company’s multi-entity partnership with Crédit Agricole, with a keynote drawn from different parts of the group’s global structure: Giorgio Solcia, Country Managing Director from asset servicing and global custody arm CACEIS Bank, with which Objectway works on transfer agent and investment compliance services; Lara Boccotti, Deputy COO from Italian asset management arm Amundi SGR, with which it collaborates on discretionary portfolio management, and Simona Feudatari, Chief Operating Officer from wealth management brand Indosuez Wealth Management Italy, with which it addresses the specific challenge of fitting Italian regulatory requirements onto a global operating model.

Together, they illustrated how technology partnerships can evolve from vendor relationships into strategic, service-oriented ecosystems spanning operational integration, regulatory complexity, client personalisation, and innovation in digital assets, tokenisation, and AI.

In the final panel, chaired by Pincetti, scalability was framed as an ecosystem effort across firms, platforms, and partners, grounded in trust, governance, accountability.

Thomas De Nil, Head of Savings & Investments, vdk bank, highlighted shifting operational complexity to specialised partners to free relationship managers for client value. Karl De Borger, Head of Sales & Relationship Management, KBC Securities Services, described a dual model combining industrialised processing with modular services delivered under strict governance and regulatory timelines. Alexander Cassar, CEO UK of Objectway, emphasised composable architectures, disciplined standardisation, and transparent partnerships as key to scaling collaboratively.

Transformation is an ongoing journey, Glyptis said as she closed the event, with partnership acting as the “golden thread” linking innovation, scalability, and long-term competitive advantage. The industry has spent years generating innovation. What it now needs – urgently, and with far more discipline than it has applied to the generation of ideas – is the ability to make that innovation stick, scale, and pay.