Please provide us with a brief introduction to Visible Capital.

Visible Capital is a WealthTech 100 technology provider that helps financial advisers, wealth managers and pension providers automatically collate and enrich client financial data for use in the financial advice journey. Our aim is to eliminate the manual processes that are still involved in client data collection.

Please introduce your offering and highlight what your proposition to the market is and why wealth management clients should consider working with you.

We provide the tools to help advisers, wealth managers and other providers understand their customers better and save time and money during the onboarding and suitability processes. We also look to improve the customer experience by providing the means for clients to aggregate, categorise and share their bank transaction, pension and credit data with their advisers. This enables straight through processing without the time consuming and often inaccurate data collection because the data is being directly inputted into the advisers back office system.

This unlocks future potential for better financial advice, new financial products and new revenue opportunities.

In terms of the wealth management sector in the UK, what types of clients do you work with and target?

We work with a wide range of firms, including IFAs, wealth managers, providers and industry bodies across the UK.

Firms of all sizes require reliable data in order to provide valuable insight to their clients. We are digitising the manual data collection processes to ensure reliability, compliance and deliver data straight into the back office system. This improves the data quality, increases the speed at which it is gathered and reduces the time required to onboard. All of this adds up to better operational and financial efficiency.

Visible Capital is still a young business but what can you tell us about your development so far and, additionally, what can you tell us about what is coming next for your business and solution? 

Our offering is up and running. We have connections to all the major banks and are already creating income and expenditure reports for clients to use in their advice journey. We also have integrations in to Iress XPlan, Intelliflo Intelligent Office and CashCalc, meaning that data can be quickly and easily transferred to the client’s core advice system without the need to rekey and recheck the data coming across.

Origo Integration Hub, meanwhile, provides pension valuation data from the top 10 pension providers to allow the quick and easy assessment of a client’s pension holdings.

This, combined with access to credit file data, is building to the ability to pull together a picture of an individual’s personal balance sheet without expensive, time consuming and manual processes.

Looking at the UK wealth management sector, what would you highlight as the top 3 trends shaping the sector now and what would you then highlight as the leading opportunities and challenges for the market today and over the next 3 years?

Digitisation
Clients and advisers expectations are being driven by technology they use in their day to day lives such as that found on their phones, with easy to use and intuitive apps. This has meant that the seamless way in which our day to day lives work is also now expected when it comes to financial advice.

This, coupled with advisers’ and wealth managers’ requirements to improve the efficiencies of their businesses and manage increasing costs, has led to advisers to seek more digital solutions.

This trend has been accelerated by the pandemic which has made the use of new, digital technology obligatory in working life. Many of the barriers, especially around compliance, have been speedily overcome as a result of the pandemic forcing change.

Consolidation
We are currently seeing a wave of consolidation in the market, driven by a handful of different factors. These include increased regulatory costs, increased fee pressures and increased technology costs - not to mention that many advisers are set to retire in the coming years. 

Regulation
Regulation has been driving a lot of work in the sector, and this is likely to continue.

RDR, MiFID II, Pension Freedoms have all had a big impact on the industry and have all led to big changes. The effects of these are still largely being felt, and this is likely to continue for years to come.

This represents a challenge to advisers and wealth managers with increased risk, costs and time being devoted to ensuring regulatory concerns are met.

The wealth managers and advisers embracing WealthTech and RegTech solutions to capitalise on these trends will likely see the highest client satisfaction, new business profitability, growth and sustainable businesses.

Bringing together of digitisation, consolidation and regulation allows the advisers, wealth managers, regulators and customers to capitalise on the trends emerging in the industry for the benefit of all.

Click here to learn more about Visible Capital and their solution offering