And what a time to be compiling our report! The Swiss wealth management industry has emerged from the pandemic with a vehement determination to tackle all the changes accelerated by Covid-19, steady their ships for the geopolitically turbulent times we are now in, and set a steady course of innovation for the future.

Top of the list is the client experience. Change was already afoot with banks realising that a move towards an omnichannel experience was a necessity for the future. But the goalposts have moved, and clients expect an opti-channel experience when it comes to the way they communicate with their advisers and the frequency and the quality of the client portals they can access. The paper report died some time ago, and banks are now keenly focusing on making sure that their clients can contact them, can access important research, and other documentation via their portal and generally have a means to engage with their advisers as and when they want. That is the client front-end challenge.

The adviser front-end challenge, meanwhile, is to supercharge advisers, enabling them to provide a robust and personalised service – at the time and over the channel of the client’s choice. They need to be able to respond to questions pretty much straight away and in a contextualised, relevant and personalised way. That means really knowing your customer and taking a holistic approach to their situation, sympathies and interests and likely needs today, and in the future. In turn that means knowing when to contact clients to send through research and investment ideas, as well as how to best respond to their clients when they make contact.

Being able to empower the adviser delights the client and increases assets under management, thus helping to retain and motivate the adviser. And a delighted client is a sticky client, and one most likely to recommend the wealth manager to others, the Holy Grail!

Technology is the clear enabler of all of this. It starts with the infrastructure and happily, many wealth managers have now embraced the advantages conferred by the Cloud and a SaaS approach. There has also been a move towards a microservices approach where a core tech stack connects via application programming interfaces (APIs) to an almost limitless universe of solution providers – all able and willing to plug functionality gaps that wealth managers want to fill to provide that customer delight, retain their clients, their advisers, and attract new ones into the mix!

No wonder this year’s Swiss WTLR 2022 has been more exciting than ever to put together!
Of course, one of the biggest issues that vendors and wealth managers face is getting to know each other, and that is where this report comes in. As with each of the other reports published in our ongoing WealthTech Landscape Report Series (WTLRs) program, our goal with the Swiss WTLR 2022 is to showcase the depth, breadth, and the growing range of technology and related solution providers (meaning things like analysts, compliance, consulting, data, insights, etc.) available to the wealth management community within Switzerland.

With content from both solution provider and vendors we aim to start a conversation that spans both sides of the community. And each and every one of the 514 solution providers included in the A-Z Solution Provider Directory at the back of this report has a business and solution profile hosted in our solution provider directory, on our website.

Our supporting event, Swiss WealthTech Live 2022, will further entrench that goal by providing a forum for members of the Swiss management community to come together, hear the views of others and exchange views and thoughts between themselves.

Background to the Swiss WTLR 2022
When we set out to build The Wealth Mosaic (TWM), we chose to focus our directory-based knowledge resource first and foremost on the growing marketplace of technology solution providers to the sector. That decision was not taken by accident. The business case for the role and relevance of technology within the wealth management sector was growing. This was coupled with the related rise in the number of technology offerings entering the market, much of it built for wealth management (#builtforwealth). Our decision to focus on this has been fully bourne out.

What we have learned as we have created TWM and continued its growth, is that the depth and breadth of the technology and related provider market to wealth managers is both large and increasingly diverse. Some key points are:

• There is no lack of technology!

• There are an increasing number of #builtforwealth solutions focused on specific challenges and/or segments of the market.

• Partnerships among providers are growing and multiplying as providers realise the benefits of collaboration for all parties.

• There are not just more specific #wealthtech offerings in the market but a massive marketplace of mass-market technology that can be applied for wealth (marketing technology being a good example).

• The mix and development in technology is opening up wealth management to new client segments, new markets and new opportunities.

In short, the evolution of the technology marketplace around the wealth management sector, aka #wealthtech, continues to evolve. Even if technology still has pain points, we are certain that the continued and daily development is ultimately for the broad benefit of the wealth management market. We very much see a technology-enabled marketplace coming to the fore and we look forward to getting deeper into the market’s development and its many offerings as we continue to build out future versions of this report and our website behind it.

Indeed, by creating and publishing this report annually, and by linking its development and maintenance to our website, we are working towards gathering information backed by a constant evolving website resource that seeks to capture every single technology and related solution provider serving, looking to serve or relevant to the business needs the Swiss wealth management market.

Everything in one place, available to wealth managers and all others, and focused on wealth management. That is the goal. However, it is important to state that this is a marathon and not a sprint! We do not yet claim to have a ‘full’ view of the market, especially across those large markets of general technology that can also be applied to wealth management. We are still learning and still discovering, and we are still frequently surprised by some of the market participants we discover in building this resource and then making that available to the market within our reports and on our website.

Ultimately, we hope we can help the Swiss wealth management sector make more informed decisions about their technology infrastructure and stay abreast of the market’s status. And, if we can support the positive evolution of the Swiss market into the future, then all the better.

This article is from The Wealth Mosaic’s Swiss WealthTech Landscape Report 2022. Access the full report here.