Digital Wealth Forum Asia 2018

We were delighted to host our annual Digital Wealth event in Singapore.  Over 250 CEOs, CIOs, COOs, heads of technology / digital, and other senior practitioners attended – from a mix of Private Banks, Retail Banks, Insurance Companies, Independent Firms & Family Offices, Asset Management Companies, and IFAs.

Below for your interest and reference are links to various content we captured from the day. Please click on the orange headlines – and do send any comments or feedback to [email protected].

Content Highlights 

Video Highlights
Video Highlights Summary
Photos
Event summary & poll results
Panel discussions
Presentations & Wealth TALKS
Videos

Post-event Report

You might also like to view the full Post-Event Report – which is a consolidated summary, including photos of speakers & delegates, the attendee profiles & some delegate feedback, polling results, and more.

Event Summary 

Wealth Management in Asia – The Road to Digitisation
The path to digitisation lies ahead, but sorting out the correct routes and avoiding the dead-ends requires continual analysis, continuous assessment of options and technologies, and a determined patience.

Video Highlights

At the Hubbis Digital Wealth Asia Forum in Hong Kong on November 9th, we interviewed leading industry experts. 
Full Video Highlights
I love wealth management

Panel Discussions 

We held 4 interactive panel discussions throughout the day – which involved 22 senior industry practitioners who we invited to participate and share their thoughts. We have also incorporated into the summaries below the briefing notes which speakers sent to us in advance of the event. Plus, we have included the results of audience polling as well as questions we received from delegates. Click on each headline to view the PDFs.

The Road Towards Digitisation – What does it Mean and How to Get There?
The direction towards digitisation in private banks and wealth management firms operating in Asia is mapped out, but each institution must find their own roads to achieve their preferred goals. The first panel discussion of the Hubbis Digital Wealth Forum in Singapore presented a fascinating insight into how the human relationship management aspects of wealth management can be coordinated with digital, robo-advisory, machine learning and other technology to provide high net worth clients with the service and efficiency, and also human interaction, they need.

Panel members

Paul Hodes  Wealth Management Head Asia Pacific and EMEA, Citi
Nick Hungerford  Senior Advisor, Portag3 Ventures
Evy Wee  Executive Director, Head of Digital Advisory & Portfolio Implementation, Regional Investment Product & Advisory, DBS Bank
Duncan Klein  Head of Outbound Product Management, BondIT
John Robson  Chief Commercial Officer, Quantifeed

Digital Developments in Wealth Management: Trials, Tribulations & Achievements
What new digital applications are coming through? Will artificial intelligence, big data and machine lead the way forward? To achieve true digital capabilities, do firms go build-your-own or plug and play? The second panel of the Hubbis Digital Wealth Forum pondered the state of digital.

Panel members

Urs Lichtenberger  Director, Client Platform, Asia Pacific, Credit Suisse Private Bankin
Mark Wightman  Partner, Wealth & Asset Management Advisory, EY
Damien Piper  Regional Director, Asia, Finantix
Thomas Achhorner  Global Head of Solutions, additiv
Sandeep Mukherjee  Managing Director, Head of Wealth Management Proposition Design, Standard Chartered Bank

Demystifying All the Hype around Digitisation
Expert panellists met at the third panel discussion to demystify some of the current buzzwords and phrases surrounding the digitisation of wealth and wealth management in Asia. Blockchain, crypto-currency and fintech were all put under the microscope.

Panel Members

Julian Kwan  Chief Executive Officer, InvestaCrowd
Navin Suri  Chief Executive Officer, Percipient
Seamus Donoghue  Vice President of Business Development, Metaco
Stanley Chao  Co-Founder and Head of Data Science, Red Pulse
Frank Henze  Practice Lead - Financial Services IT, Trimantium GrowthOps

Digital: Can it Facilitate Faster, Cheaper and Better Wealth Management?
Panellists on the fourth panel of the day debated the rise of robo-advisory solutions and decided that although technology is coming along in leaps and bounds, a robo-human hybrid is the preferred solution for the foreseeable future. The financial sector broadly and the wealth management industry in particular will no doubt continue on the path towards digitisation as customers demand faster and more user-friendly experiences and as the financial firms seek lower cost, more efficient processes that add to their competitive edge.

Panel members

Freddy Lim  Co-founder & Chief Investment Officer, StashAway
Kunal Bajaj  Founder, Chief Executive Officer, Clearfunds
Tanmai Sharma  Chief Executive Officer, Canopy
Elena Okhonko  Independent Financial Adviser, Financial Alliance
Mark Nelligan  Chief Executive Officer, Singapore, Pershing
Charlie O Flaherty  Partner, Crossbridge Capital

Presentations 

Below are summaries of the Presentations and Wealth TALKS delivered at the event. These were 10-minute slots hosted either by senior industry practitioners who we invited to speak (Wealth TALKS), or by some of our event partners (Presentations). Also listed with each summary are links to the presentation slides (where these are made available by speakers). Click on each headline to view the web versions of these – from which you can also access the 1-page PDFs.

Robo, Blockchain and Predictive Analytics – Their Applications in Wealth Management
Timothy Neville, Singapore based Managing Director for FinTech FNZ, made a presentation to delegates attending the Digital Wealth Forum on the application of Blockchain, predictive analytics and Robo advisory within the wealth management sector.

Adapting Wealth Management for a BigTech World
David Wilson, Head of Asia Wealth Management in Singapore for CapGemini, is a leader in trying to digitally enable Asia’s wealth managers as they face the encroachment of fintech, BigTech and other challenges. 

RegTech solutions for the digitisation of client onboarding
The automation and digitisation of the Client Onboarding & Lifecycle management are fundamental for all private banks and financial institutions (FI) to significantly decrease compliance and operational cost while increasing customer satisfaction. Digitising even only a few key areas of the onboarding process can already bring substantial improvements for FIs. Dr. Andreas Wenger, APAC GM of IMTF – Swiss leader of process automation & digital transformation for the global financial industry since 1987– enlightened delegates of the Digital Wealth Forum in Singapore on how RegTech solutions can help FIs enhance customer experience, operational efficiency and compliance in onboarding.

Strategies for Enabling a Customer-First Digital Wealth Platform
Darryn Noble, Vice President, Sales Consulting at NexJ Systems, believes that wealth management firms that do not optimise their customer relationship management, AI and machine learning risk missing out on a great opportunity to truly differentiate their businesses.

The Four Waves of Agile: How Banks and Wealth Managers can become agile
John Okoro, Head of Agile Practice at Swiss management and technology consulting firm Orbium, educated delegates on what he terms the four waves of agile, which provide a roadmap for banks charting their course through the difficult terrain towards digital transformations.

Bringing Wealth Management Client Communications into the 21st Century
Shane Meredith, Director of Wealth & Advisory at SS&C Technologies, explained that real-time digital communications are vital to the successful future of wealth management. He warned that with ‘wealth’ becoming ever younger in Asia, the wealth management industry must rise to this challenge or risk losing their ever-increasingly tech-savvy clients to competitors.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls Faced during Multi-Generational Wealth Planning
Mark Nelligan, CEO of Pershing Securities Singapore, advised wealth management advisers to help open the eyes of their Asian high net worth individuals and family clients to the pitfalls of unstructured wealth transition planning and the dangers of poor thought and communication. If families want to succeed in transitioning wealth between generations, they must think carefully about the required steps, must strategise and structure, they must communicate and make every effort to be transparent.

Open Banking: Driving Robo-advice Opportunities to New Heights
John Robson, Chief Commercial Officer of Hong Kong-based Quantifeed is a strong advocate of open banking that provides access and information to the providers and customers, a strong proponent of high-quality information that helps achieve quality results, and of the value of creating a more pleasant wealth management experience for everyone involved. He foresees a new era emerging for Robo-advisory solutions around Asia-Pacific.

Under the Hood of Aviva’s Data-Driven and Customer-centric Offering to Wealth Managers
Rachel Chen, Head of Digital Wealth (dollarDEX) at Aviva Asia Digital presented a Workshop at the Hubbis Digital Wealth Forum to explain how she and her team work continuously to upgrade the platform using data-based decision-making. They know that a positive customer experience is achieved by design, not by chance. She advised delegates to test and learn continuously in order to rapidly implement changes that are best for clients.

Digital Transformation, Data and a Holistic, Digitised Vision of Excellence
Frank Henze, Practice Lead, Financial Services IT at Trimantium GrowthOps, believes private banks and wealth managers urgently need to transition from a traditional front, middle and back office paradigm to what his entrepreneurial services firm terms ‘Digital Continuum’. Data, argued Henze, is central to this revolution, as it helps drive digitisation, but to extract the full value from data involves a quite radical change in strategy and work practices as well as continuous innovation. The goals are client contentment, client retention and revenue expansion.