Helping Transform the APAC Financial Landscape with additiv’s Revolutionary Cloud-based Platform

Swiss wealth orchestration platform additiv is on a mission in the APAC region to reinforce its global leadership role in digital Wealth Management and Wealth Management-as-a-Service. At the heart of the thrust is the remarkable global expansion of embedded finance and embedded wealth, which additiv’s leaders believe will become a truly vast phenomenon in the coming decade, making financial services easier for end customers to access as well as significantly cheaper. Hubbis met recently with Nils Frowein, since mid-2023 additiv’s global CEO and Anurag Pandey, now General Manager and Head, APAC to learn more about additiv’s platform, which is designed to help incumbent financial and non-financial entities offer new or extended digital wealth products and solutions to their existing customer base, thereby driving additional revenue streams. We found that under their combined stewardship, additiv is adroitly navigating some exciting paths through the evolving financial technology landscape in Asia Pacific, aligning Nils’ strategic skills and entrepreneurial flair with Anurag’s nuanced understanding of the Asian market's huge potential and its many challenges.

In the many dealings Hubbis has enjoyed with additiv for many years, it has been evident that additiv has strategised and then articulated a clear vision of how technological innovation creates new disruptive business models and enhances inclusion, especially in financial services. Indeed, leaders at additiv believe their platform is far more than just another technological ‘product’; it represents a vital avenue to help facilitate a paradigm shift in how financial services are accessed, delivered, and experienced.

Positive disruption

“We are not looking at changing a little bit here and there, making something more beautiful, and then going to the market; we want to help truly and very positively disrupt the market,” Anurag asserts with genuine enthusiasm. “We believe this ambition to revolutionise rather than merely enhance existing financial and wealth models sets additiv apart in the financial technology space. And we are doing this for both financial and non-financial enterprises, indeed for any serious entity seeking to expand and diversify their revenue streams.”

Today, additiv is a fast-growing, financial solutions company with around 300 employees worldwide. It has evolved from a Swiss software developer into a global platform provider for ‘Finance-as-a-Service’ (FaaS) with a focus on wealth management and retirement solutions. The platform covers investments, credit, insurance and payment systems for financial and non-financial clients to add or complement their existing revenue streams. The firm now has expanding offices in the world's major financial centres such as Zurich, Frankfurt, Dubai and Singapore.

Opening new doors to additional revenue streams

And justifiably based on the client list and history of growth, additiv positions its cloud-based platform as one of the world’s most powerful solutions in wealth management, credit and insurance. The technology, together with the firm’s global ecosystem of regulated financial service providers, opens new opportunities for banks, insurance companies, asset managers, IFAs and also for non-financial retailers and consumer brands to offer their own and third-party financial solutions quickly and flexibly via existing or new customer channels.

Nils himself arrived as CEO in June 2023 to help additiv capitalise on all its efforts over the past years, including in the APAC region, where the firm has operated since 2018. He brought with him the experience of a highly successful 10 years as CEO of Swiss Life International, as well as a wealth of other related career experiences over the previous two decades.

Nils adds his experience and impetus

His mission is to drive further growth and business development alongside additiv Michael Stemmle, who said at the time of Nils’ arrival: “I am delighted to have Nils as a new member of our team. With his support, we will leverage our leading technological positioning to develop the business model further, to help accelerate our international growth, and actively accompany our customers in the transformation of the financial industry."

On his transition from such a prestigious role at Swiss Life, Nils says: “I saw the move to additiv as an opportunity and a challenge to make high-quality wealth, insurance, credit and pensions solutions accessible to different customer groups in line with their needs via embedded finance, which has huge growth potential. According to Visa, the embedded finance opportunity is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 24% to reach USD776 billion. Our proprietary cloud platform enables financial and non-financial businesses to source and produce their own and third-party financial services via APIs or to leverage existing end-to-end financial solutions.”

Disruption within Asia’s Dynamic Financial Ecosystem

Turning to their mission in the APAC region, Anurag observes that Asia's dynamic financial ecosystem is characterised by a fast-expanding mass affluent and middle class, rapidly evolving and young demographics, massive wealth transfer activity and a huge protection gap, all of which present a unique set of opportunities for additiv to participate in positive wealth sector disruption.

He elaborates: “We have been here in this region since 2018 and Asia is one of the most important markets for us, and characterised by innovation and disruption. Asia has leapfrogged the rest of the world in financial services in several areas, including payments, digital banking, digital financial services, and super apps. We have a platform that offers a perfect avenue for our customers to participate in and actually accelerate this disruption. Our mission is, therefore, to be a leading facilitator of positive transformation in the broader wealth market. We want the clients to say that additiv made an impact to help deliver something materially different to what they offered before.”

Aligning demand and supply

Nils concurs, adding that it is vital to relay the message that additiv is there to help both financial and non-financial institutions expand and augment their existing business models, thereby adding new profit tributaries.

“Through the additiv orchestration platform, we bring demand and supply together and open up new growth opportunities that companies have not had before,” he explains. “We can say we are helping them bring out the full orchestra of opportunities that they wish to pursue.”

Partners for the future

Anurag says that the firm wants to be seen as aligned as a partner in this positive disruption effort, working alongside their clients to help transform the revenue models of businesses in the region. “This is a crucial differentiation to emphasise,” he reports. “We are not selling products; we are helping our customers realise the potential they identify to expand revenues. Essentially, we are partners aligned in the customers’ vision of growth.”

Transformative capabilities

Nils expands on these comments, noting that additiv is a platform provider, helping both financial and non-financial customers expand or add wealth management services to their proposition. “They might want to add credit propositions to their current customer journeys, or they may want to add the insurance experience to those client journeys, and we are there as the enabler, the catalyst to make this possible.”

Nils offers a directly relevant example of a successful transformative and also disruptive mission. He explains that they have worked closely of late with the Swiss Coop, a leading retailer in Switzerland, and one of the largest in Europe with over CHF30 billion of revenue.

Leveraging customer bases

“We have helped them with the launch of their new Coop Finance+, a super app providing comprehensive financial services, and we will next layer in a variety of financial services right from account opening to credit cards, insurance products and investment products, all facilitated via additiv’s cloud-based platform,” he reports. “We are bringing their end-customer leading financial brands, products and services via our platform and through their super-app, they are accessing over three million clients in Switzerland.”

In this way, Coop is in the process of transforming itself from a non-financial business to engage in new financial revenue and profit streams from the wider wealth and financial sectors.

Nils also explains that additiv works closely with financial sector clients, for example in the form of life or non-life insurers, to help them evolve new revenue streams. “We can achieve this diversification and augmentation for them within six to eight months from inception,” he reports. “This allows them to realise their visions rapidly and seamlessly and launch themselves on the path of business transformation.”

Additiv: playing to its strengths in Asia

Anurag explains that these types of projects also work ideally in the Asia-Pacific markets, where he also notes there is considerably more cost-sensitivity than in Europe, whether the market concerned is as rich and advanced as Singapore or more of an emerging market in the region.

“However, this plays to our strengths,” he reports. “If these customers try to develop all these new streams in-house, it can end up costing them a lot more, the outcomes are uncertain, and also all those costs are upfront, payable well before the revenues kick in. However, we can help them rapidly and efficiently transform and then begin disrupting market segments, all with low upfront costs, meaning they are better able to deliver their customers cost-effective offerings.”

Trust is earned and proved

Nils explains that additiv has an established reputation working with top-tier companies in both Europe and Asia.

“Our customers tend to be very well-established and have a clear strategic vision, and they have access to often very sizable customer communities, so they are trusting us to help deliver new products and services efficiently and cost-effectively to those customers that they have been building for many years,” he reports. “They need a provider that is totally driven by quality and bullet-proof in terms of reliability, and that truly delivers on its promises. In a nutshell, that is what additiv represents - past, present and future – and that is why we work so successfully with many of the leading financial as well as non-financial brands.”

Key Priorities

Nils then focuses his attention on their key priorities, noting that his own number one objective is to refine the execution of their platform strategy. Anurag says that in the APAC region, his priority is to expand further in the Philippines and Indonesia, building the teams that will allow the firm to seize the remarkable opportunities in those and other Asian markets.

“We have a proposition that is really working, so now it is all about refining our execution and driving into these markets where we see such great potential,” Nils reports. “Execution of the proposition and strategy is the key for the foreseeable future.”

Envisioning a Future of Disruption and Growth

As additiv marches confidently into the future, Nils and Anurag are united in their vision of executing the platform strategy and penetrating new markets. They emphasise the importance of making existing customer journeys more diverse and helping them explore and realise new profit avenues. Their shared goal is clear: to establish additiv as a trusted partner to clients of all types to help them expand in the broader wealth and financial sector.

Getting Personal: Anurag Pandey, additiv General Manager and Head, Asia-Pacific

Anurag Pandey, who since January 2024 has been serving as the General Manager and Head, Asia-Pacific at additiv, has a career marked by diversity and dynamism. Born in Bhopal, India, Anurag's educational journey took him from computer science engineering to a Master’s in Business Administration at the Indian Institute of Management, in Kozhikode in the state of Kerala.

His career trajectory is a mosaic of experiences across startups, investment banking, and strategy consulting, including a leadership role in PwC's asset and wealth management sector in Southeast Asia. “The consistent thread is seizing on exciting opportunities and big challenges to achieve audacious goals,” he says.

Anurag is not just about professional pursuits; he is a dedicated family man with two children. He cherishes nature and enjoys hiking, often embarking on these adventures with his family. These activities are not just pastimes, but a way for him to connect with his loved ones and the world around him.

In his role at additiv, Anurag is enjoying the opportunity to make a marked difference in the financial services industry. He aspires to disrupt and enhance the ways in which financial services are delivered in the Asia-Pacific region. Anurag's vision for additiv is not just about client acquisition or project sizes; it is about helping reshape financial services, about making a real difference.

“I firmly believe in the potential of additiv to be a game-changer in the industry, a strong and trusted partner to clients in their growth and diversification journeys,” he states. “This is an exciting new chapter as head of this region, and I relish the opportunity to innovate, disrupt, and elevate the financial services landscape in Asia-Pacific.”

At home, Anurag and his wife have a five-year old son and a daughter of just over two months. Understandably with a young family, spare time is for family pursuits, with a love of hiking in mountainous terrain for the fresh air and exercise.

Getting Personal: Nils Frowein, CEO of additiv

Fifty-nine years young, Nils joined as Global CEO of additiv on July 1, 2023, arriving from a 10-year tenure as CEO of Swiss Life International. His mission is to drive further growth and business development together with its founder, Michael Stemmle, additiv said at the time in a press release.

With 10 years as CEO and also Member of the Executive Board at Swiss Life, and with an impressive career before that, Nils brought a rich tapestry of experience to additiv.

“This is a great opportunity for me to put my entrepreneurial energies to good use,” he reports. “I could easily have moved to another financial institution, but at the age of 59 I felt that this was a logical and exciting step and would both suit me well and benefit additiv. So far, it is proving to be exactly that, as we are all working really well together to help achieve the next phase of additiv’s evolution. We have a marvellous proposition and a great future ahead, including in some key untapped markets and regions, for example, the Philippines and Indonesia in Asia.”

Nils is German by birth but resides contentedly in Zurich, Switzerland, where he lives with his wife and three children. Nils values family time immensely, finding family pursuits a source of distraction and re-energisation.

He enjoys an active and diverse life outside the office, combining a passion for family life, skiing and tennis, as well as a love for cultural activities, and plenty of travel.