It is rare to hear a presentation that you can resonate with 100%. However, the speech by Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, at Sibos struck a particular chord with us. He spoke coherently and in-depth about the main values of digital transformation and the API economy: the Cloud, AI, speed, and agility.

Everything Dimon speaks about in those first 15-minutes completely applies to our industry, and according to Dimon, new entrants to the industry have been laser-focused on client pain points. Because of this, the digital experience of wealth propositions launched in the last five years stands in stark contrast to the older players. Unencumbered by legacy technology, new entrants have been able to come up with hugely attractive business models that have tripped up incumbents.

The technology stacks these new entrants use contribute significantly toward the superiority of their digital customer experiences. These start-ups would not have thought to use on premise technology for basing their digital propositions. Instead, the use of the public Cloud is standardised, which allows them to launch fast and, more importantly: react quickly based on their client demand. Agility is king!

We have entered another turbulent period for the markets – and all organisations need to think carefully about what their operating models, value propositions, and customer experience will look like when their clients return from this latest period of volatility, looking to capitalise on the rising tide. More specifically, how organisations can feel more confident using the correct technology to push the more daunting projects forward. And, of course, how WealthOS can support these firms of all shapes and sizes, to raise their expectations and solve their pain points.

Pass off the heavy lifting
Firstly, you can pass on the infrastructure-heavy lifting. The beauty of using the Cloud’s maximised capabilities is that you get a considerable reduction in effort and cost to support and implement new ideas and changes while supporting ongoing operations. Getting a sandbox version of an old-fashioned platform into an organisation can take up to 12 weeks of effort – including provisioning servers and environments, installation, configuration, etc. But you should be able to spin up a sandbox in minutes. And with the Cloud, you can. Why? Because there are no servers or networks. By leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), we have built a fully automated process to build all the infrastructure needed for a fully-dedicated environment at the click of a button. Imagine a sandbox setup with Stripe that takes a few minutes; that is what you can now experience in wealth management.

Focus on your customer experience
Another area of major friction when working with legacy and old-fashioned tech is the necessary additional engineering that takes place to orchestrate and automate workflows. For example, to build a workflow that onboards the client and open an ISA account through a single digital journey, you must build all the business logic to sequence these atomic, yet dependent, tasks.

The technology needs to not only provide all the atomic features you need but also deliver prebuilt automated workflows that perfectly correspond to your digital customer experience and be available right out of the box. For example, you can combine account funding and investment instruction into a single digital journey, stitch together all the buy and sell deals pertaining to a switch transaction or combine a withdrawal instruction with a sell transaction for just the right amount. This newly efficient process means freeing up time and resources to solely focus on your customer experience.

Operationalise your amazing digital wealth vision
You should expect a catalogue of APIs to allow you to easily connect the previously mentioned, well-orchestrated workflows with the awesome digital experience your UX designers and UI developers come up with.

Say you want to create a new client and have a response that it has succeeded, the REST API suite will allow you to send request/ response messages. If you want to send a text message when a client’s buy order has been executed, WebSocket APIs will allow you to listen to streaming messages.

See low code/no code in action
To achieve true automation, it is essential to integrate with other applications: KYC/AML, payment gateways, order routing, and security data providers to name a few. Traditionally, you would manage all these painful integrations - each of which can take months to design, build, test, and deploy - not to mention the cost. Visualise instead a marketplace of integrations where organisations can pick from a menu of specialist software providers, and simply switch to work with the relevant workflows.

All this and more is possible with our Cloud-native, comprehensive core technology platform. It can onboard and hold client data, provide all the rules to administer tax wrappers like ISAs and SIPPs, hold and update data pertaining to securities (funds, ETFs, equities), open accounts and maintain up-to-date client positions and support transaction records, support transaction workflows like cash in and out, buy, sell, switch, and rebalance, compute and deduct fees, generate client communications, generate regulatory reports and a whole lot more. To be clear, we are a software company - we don’t offer regulated services like being an ISA manager, SIPP operator or a custodian - at least not yet. We provide the kit and we make sure it’s bang up to date in terms of regulatory compliance.

As Dimon stated, organisations must make their technology stack nimble to be able to be responsive. By shifting to the Cloud - whether by adopting Cloud for new products or by gradually introducing Cloud capabilities to existing products - organisations can take a step towards this goal. We provide the features and functionalities to operate many use cases of wealth products. If you are thinking about digital wealth products, such as automated digital wealth, trading apps, digital direct indexing, retirement planning, and drawdown apps, or any other type of innovative wealth proposition, get in touch with us, as our platform could be the ideal solution to bring your innovations to market at an affordable rate, at a lightning-fast pace.

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