Strategy & Practice Management
Digital delivery of wealth management – the era of the platform
Damian Hitchen of Swissquote
Feb 19, 2018
Swiss bank Swissquote serves its entire global client base of more than 350,000 customers entirely through digital interface. Damian Hitchen, Swissquote’s CEO for the Middle East and Asia at Swissquote, believes the digital revolution has much further to go.
All our clients around the world manage their bank accounts and their global trading via a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone,” Hitchen reported to the audience at the Hubbis Independent Wealth Management Forum in Hong Kong in November 2017. “Our unerring focus is moving wealth management and the customer experience into the digital world.”
Swissquote’s customers include B2B, for example full service global banks, private banks, independent asset managers, or family offices, all of which are looking to provide their clients with an enhanced digital experience.
Accessibility and simplicity
“The clients’ needs today are driven by accessibility,” he explained. “Over the last 15 years we have had huge advances in the way we deal with technology, so most of our lives today revolve around the smartphone and that means the wealth management industry has a very big gap to bridge.”
Hitchen noted that when Swissquote conducts market research about competition in Switzerland it looks far beyond the banks to Big Tech. “From a technology perspective today, there are commoditised nodes of payments, wealth management, robo-advisory and so forth. The threat from non-traditional firms will only increase as we move forward if we do not step up our game and provide people with what they want.”
Hitchen therefore warned against complacency, against banks and wealth management firms sitting back and assuming that their clients will continue to work with them. “We on the other hand always look to change the whole UX [User Experience] and that means changing functionality, changing accessibility, changing deliverables.”
Hitchen noted however that the established global banking majors are now grasping the fact that everyone wants to make the move to digital. But he warned that banks and other wealth providers need to constantly reassess their digital journey. Too often, he said, the digital experience simply does not work properly, slowed down by inappropriately structured technology solutions or for many of the banks legacy systems.
In the HNW sector, there is a question as to what role the relationship managers will play in the face of digital and robo-advisory. “This will be on a case-by-case basis,” said Hitchen, “but certainly the very minimum expected of the firms and the RMs is that they deliver their clients information and data that is concise and relevant.”
Scalability essential
Technology will also add to pressures on fees. Accordingly, Hitchen highlighted the importance of a platform that is scalable and accessible for clients to use. The move to technology means from a commercial perspective firms should generate a lot of passive revenue, driven by data and information. So, for example, a client might decide to buy certain stocks based on information fed through to them digitally.
“Give your clients the platform and you can make passive income,” Hitchen said. “It is not rocket science, but it is a journey that the industry still needs to go through.”
Hitchen noted that Swissquote’s two largest commercial days in the past two years were ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’. “Volumes went crazy and that is because we are giving people access to information and execution capabilities.”
Hitchen advised institutions, even those with very large client bases, to move rapidly with the digital transition. “Clients will increasingly prefer to deal with only a few providers rather than dealing with multiple providers, so enhancing via technology will build that trusted relationship.”
The advent of ever more relevant and sophisticated technology solutions is changing the competitive landscape. “We are seeing increased commoditisation of what we do within financial services. That allows new market entrants, non-banks or non-FI companies, to start doing the things that we do on a day to day basis.”
Hitchen concluded his talk by noting that Swissquote provides execution, custodian, middle and back office support to more than 500 B2B partners with over 75,000 individual client accounts with over $5billion of assets
“We give them access to our systems and our global trading platform and they are plugging it into their existing online banking,” he explained. “White labelling and branding is also critical, so they can use our technology and white label it to look and feel like their own.”
Chief Executive Officer, Singapore at Swissquote
More from Damian Hitchen, Swissquote
Latest Articles