Michel Klompmaker
The Italian Objectway, with offices in the UK, Belgium and South Africa recently held its international customer conference in Amsterdam, where your platform was also invited. The event began with an exclusive visit to the famous Van Gogh Museum, where Luigi Marciano, President & CEO of Objectway, proudly presented the new company brand on one of the walls.
Currently, the development of wealth and investment market is dominated by four important topics: regulatory pressure, new technology, customer satisfaction and competition, said Stephen Wall, Senior Analyst at AITE, one of the guest speakers. Stephen Wall: “Service differentiation by client segment and client behavior will be key to ensure a personalized digital wealth experience, from engagement, across advice, to goal-based wealth management as a perfect full-service and client-centric response.”
Responding to digitization can therefore help financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies to meet these challenges. Indeed, only by the proper use of digitalization, the necessary growth can be realized. This was in fact the main theme of the Objectway Customer Conference which took place late last year at the Conservatorium Hotel in Amsterdam.
Luigi Marciano, Objectway’s CEO and founder, believes that digitization must eventually lead to growth. To achieve this, financial institutions must manage customer experience and business processes in a digitally integrated fashion, said Marciano.
From modular, one-stop-shop to BPO
Objectway is provider of financial software and helps its clients (in 15 countries) with the support of digital platforms for wealth and investment managers, working in the banking, insurance and securities sectors.
Peter Schramme, Chief Business Development Officer, gave an overview of the markets Objectway operates in, and outlined how Objectway approaches those markets. Many brand-new products were presented during the conference. Amongst them, Optimo, the solution for efficient model portfolio construction that reduces the time and complexity of the asset allocation process and provides a valuable platform to define strategic and tactical asset allocations to create MiFID-compliant client portfoliosn. Then SURE, the suitability engine that enables financial institutions to stand up to MiFID II requirements, ensuring that compliance requirements are respected. Finally, Hybrid Advisory, the platform for goal-based advisory and investment planning that blends in frictionless fashion advisor-directed and investor-directed approaches..
New is the investment management BPO proposition that Objectway now offers. The first customer is already on board. The entire BPO process is operated in Ireland for the European market.
More digitization
As a special keynote speaker, Chris Skinner was invited. The Englishman now has 14 books to his name, including one on MiFID. He sketched, reasoning from the past, the situation in the Financial Services Industry and came up with some interesting comparisons. As such he made the comparison between “good old” Barclays with a market capitalization of 30 billion euros (around 130,000 employees) and PayPal with a market capitalization of 48 billion euros run by 10 percent of the number of Barclays employees, i.e. around 13,000. Amongst other things, this led him to the conclusion that wealth management could be completely irrelevant in 100 years.
Skinner stated it as follows: “Digital is all about rethinking wealth management for the internet age, re-imagining how to offer finance through technology. There is an opportunity to remain relevant if banks can do it smartly.”
At the International Customer Conference, the results of the joint Objectway-Efma study “Digital Engagement and Collaboration in Wealth and Investment Management” were presented. The results of this survey show that baseline capabilities for digital engagement and collaboration are rapidly becoming important qualifiers in the industry. The adoption of hybrid and robo advice tools is imminent and will realize a higher growth compared to the traditional online investment management tools, says one of the findings of the report.
