InvestCloud’s APAC Leaders on Fast-Tracking Cost-Effective Digital Transformation

InvestCloud is a powerhouse global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) wealth solutions platform that is one of the fastest-growing B2B WealthTech businesses globally. The firm has the vision to facilitate the digitisation of offerings as financial institutions adjust their business models to rapidly evolving markets where clients expect a more relevant, personal and real-time proposition, and all for lower fees. Hubbis met recently with two of the InvestCloud executives now guiding the firm across APAC, namely Geneva-based Christine Ciriani, CEO for EMEA & APAC, and James Verner, President for APAC, based in Hong Kong. Together, they are rapidly building partnerships with leading private banks, insurers and other intermediaries to digitise their wealth management operations and enhance client experiences. They explain how InvestCloud’s modular approach allows clients to upgrade their capabilities and create efficiencies in a cost-effective and agile manner, rather than seeking out the traditional and risky ‘Big Bang’ solution. In APAC, they report they have been investing heavily to align the firm’s global capabilities and technologies with local talent and expertise, which is empathetic to the local market, in what they believe is a winning combination.

James opens the conversation by zooming in on APAC, explaining that there has been significant investment in the region, not just in the next-generation product platform, but also in infrastructure and in talent.

“The global corporate story serves as the springboard for a major leap forward in APAC,” he reports. “And that is our core message, that we are building fast out here.” Christine concurs, adding that the firm is increasingly seen as both local and global, bringing adaptability to the local environment alongside the best global technologies and practices.

Unrivalled capability

James elaborates on the proposition, explaining that the firm offers an unrivalled breadth of capability. “We span from mass affluent to top-tier private wealth, across all aspects of communication, planning as well as shopping and selling of financial products.” he reports. “And we span the worlds of banking, insurance and asset management.”

He adds that they take a modular approach, allowing clients to take an app-based approach, then building block by block (“app” is what InvestCloud calls their functional modules). “This enables rapid speed to market and agility for our clients,” he says. “We do this globally, and we can do this across APAC, through our offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. Our team is comprised of about 400 team members in the region.”

Three core elements

He explains that there are three core elements to their business and approach. The first is digital enablement for wealth managers such as financial intermediaries, led by communication and planning solutions. InvestCloud enables this with a design-led approach and AI technology for generating code to configure the 300+ apps that InvestCloud offers. Second is to allow clients to make the most of existing investments while overcoming technology debt, which for the larger banks and institutions is usually very significant. InvestCloud achieves this with its Digital Warehouse that is pre-integrated to over 1,000 systems and data sources and can be used to overlay new systems easily. And thirdly, enabling commerce enablement through shopping and selling solutions for financial products, bringing advisors and asset managers together. These solutions enable simple search, simple execution and simple product management solutions, among other functions,” James reports.

Expanding from within

He explains that the firm is delivering incremental services and products to fit the APAC market. For example, using in-house AI expertise for things like delivering Next Best Action recommendations to advisors in an appropriately localised way. “We are expanding their reach to help RMs and advisors tailor their advice and their timing and delivery to build more clients, relevance and activity for the HNW market,” he reports.

Christine steps back from their immediate missions in the region and reports that clients often ask them for their vision of the future, or the corporate ‘why’ as she describes it.

Partners in the climb

“Our answer,” she says, “is that we are partnering with the clients for their digital transformation into the future, evolving with them in a modular fashion, evolving their platforms to their own benefit and for the benefit of their clients. Our model is B2B and then the clients dramatically improve their B2C capabilities and delivery by partnering with us.”

James expands on this, reporting that this is what the firm has already achieved in many jurisdictions. “Globally, there are over 150 asset managers that then connect to over 400 wealth managers including over 140,000 financial advisors, and that represents over USD6.3 trillion of assets working through InvestCloud,” he reports. “This gives us huge confidence in our ability to connect the wholesalers of financial products to the distributors, which means the right products end up in the end customers’ portfolios.”

Seeking out the growing mass affluent market

Christine offers another perspective, noting that the ability to self-service advice is driven by the desire to scale and democratise wealth for the enormous and growing mass affluent segment of clients.

“For example,” she reports, “we have a client in the region who has chosen us as their client portal and robo, which is a client collaboration powered with advice engines. It gives both a self-service capability as well as a hybrid capability so the advisors in-house can see the same thing that a client sees, or a client in a certain segment can also self-service and invest based on recommendations of model portfolios, based on the risk profile, based on their appetite and based on their goals.”

She adds that this hybrid advice journey started in Hong Kong and Singapore and is now extending out into other markets across the region. “The model is agile and adaptable, so the client can rapidly and economically adjust the user experience to the different markets and cultures of the region,” she reports. “We actually achieved very rapid deployment in less than six months because of our no-code approach to combining apps and configuring differentiated user journeys.”

Christine explains, “If you think about the old-school approach, which is hard-coding, it means technology is very hard, very slow and very expensive to change. Which means every adopting firm looks more or less the same. Not to mention, when coders leave, someone has to inherit that code and maintain it. The business results are poor client experience, poor advisor experience, poor access to products and high cost in operations – all of which compromise client and advisor retention, challenge growth and harm operational efficiency. By contrast, InvestCloud’s AI-powered code generation tool iProgram enables total solutions to be assembled in three to nine months and not years. With iProgram, one business analyst or designer can do 50 programmers' work and create hyper-modular user experiences and user journeys with our apps that are empathetic to the needs of the client and end-user. iProgram massively reduces the cost of delivery and maintenance, and enables true digital differentiation.”

Consolidation to InvestCloud

Another example of a live project she cites centres on Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) including CRM. “In a nutshell,” she says, “they decided to go with us and replace three different providers with us, effectively starting at the outset, expediting better digital onboarding, and then using AI and ML to leverage that data and extend through to CRM and CLM. Making the extraction and use of data more valuable to the RMs and more efficient throughout is a win-win for all.”

The importance of aggregating, leveraging and analysing data cannot be over-stated, argues Christine. She explains, “Traditionally, a firm – especially an established firm – has lots of systems that don’t work with each other. That means your information is everywhere and often there are manual processes everywhere to work around the data challenges. The pain that causes in operational risk and cost is enormous. With our Digital Warehouse, InvestCloud has created one model of the financial industry for all clients that enables all client information to be catalogued in one place and can be overlayed and integrated to financial companies’ technology, thereby easing data aggregation from multiple sources (in some cases dozens per client). Once the data is mastered, it can be used in many ways, and this means firms are not forced to replace all systems in order to harness a benefit in a particular arena. Not to mention, we enable our clients to use data science to assess what’s going well in their portals and what could be further improved.”

The seismic shift to ‘buy’ from ‘build’

James says the types of assignments they are involved in today underscore the transition away from in-house builds to buy and use. “Historically the larger institutions were either build in-house or build partly in-house and blend with several vendors’ solutions,” he explains. “But you risk ending up with Frankenstein's monster. Hence, from an efficiency and deliverability viewpoint, many banks and other institutions now prefer to be much more agile, to scale rapidly and to work on a modular basis. That, in our view, is the way forward.”

Christine observes that even at the other end of the scale away from the major banks, the smaller players in the region are increasingly servicing cross-border needs and clients in various regions, and they too need agility.

A more complex world

She says a single market business is rare these days, and clients increasingly want access to a wide range of assets, products, solutions and advice from an international perspective, and they want direct access as well as RM support for the wealthier clients. Accordingly, it has become increasingly important to use a digital platform, not simply to digitalise the whole wealth management process, but to really accelerate the right advice at scale, to boost relevance and still provide that last mile of the journey person-to-person format, and of course to stay agile.

“Moreover,” she observes, “clients in Asia need to look to the future. We are seeing more participation amongst the next generations, with technology expanding the connectivity to families and to those future clients, who have different expectations for their wealth management proposition and delivery.”

Relevance and personalisation

James expands on the theme of relevance and personalisation, noting that this could manifest itself in many different ways, perhaps for example, a thematic ESG tilted model portfolio that somebody is interested in. Other client solutions might be tailored to estate planning and wealth transition. Some solutions might be more about planning for retirement. And so forth.

“So, for me,” he says, “we must think about a better client experience, about how to manage data, and then the clients need to work out which segments they want to compete in, leveraging the technology and solutions to attack multiple market segments if they wish and in a very personalised manner from day one.”

InvestCloud’s design-led solutions

They summarise some key reasons clients might want to work with them. Modular, says Christine, means rapid deployment on an affordable basis. Secondly, they are specialised in wealth and investment management, not a generic provider.

And James adds that they also have immense experience and scale, having worked with over 550 institutions across the world using a single code base.

“What does that mean?” he ponders. “Well, every time we develop new capabilities, all 550 plus of our clients get access to that too, all on a massively configurable basis” he reports.

And the solutions are ‘elegant’ as well. “Our differentiator is also the beauty of our design,” she says. “We do have over 100 designers who are ensuring not only a design-led approach – for example, focusing on solutions that are very intuitive in terms of look and feel,” she says. “We're also experts in behavioural science. Certainly, it is about being ‘beautiful’ to behold and intuitive, but a truly compelling proposition also requires that gaming theory and decision theory influence the design to influence engagement. This is our specialty.”

Partnerships and friendships

And James also quips: “We are also a nice bunch of people to work with.” But joking apart, he says InvestCloud remains a founder-led company, with those leaders very engaged with the firm’s growth, overall strategy and operations.

“We believe we can successfully deliver a future-proof solution that then has the flexibility to allows us to continue to transform, invent and deliver future advances and new solutions for our clients,” he says.

“We are delivering for our clients who are constantly looking for lower costs to serve, looking for new journeys, new propositions, wanting to outmanoeuvre their competition, expand their markets. We have the scale, history and capabilities to meet all those expectations head-on. That is why our clients see us as long-term strategic partners, and less as simply a vendor.”

Key Priorities

James reports that their number one mission in the region is to continue to deliver successfully to clients there, and with successful client growth so to InvestCloud will continue their expansion.

“We have been investing heavily in all key areas, so we are able to help our clients deliver on their objectives,” he reports. “I can summarise this by saying it is all about our commitments to our clients and to their growth.”

InvestCloud also aspires to really establish the business as Asia's leading WealthTech provider. “We want to be global in reach and expertise, but local in how we deliver value, functionality, localisation and how we support our clients on an on-going basis,” he explains. “Accordingly, over the next year or two, we are installing local market experts in each country we are present in, people who really know and understand those markets intimately, and who are capable of helping us embed ourselves as Asia's leading WealthTech vendor.”

For Christine, a third key mission is around partnerships and the ecosystem. “I reiterate that we are modular in approach, and we have already built a huge ecosystem, with some 1,000 plus integrations to well-known systems and data providers across the globe,” she reports. “And we are constantly expanding that connectivity, and constantly enhancing that ecosystem,” she reports.

The momentum gathers

The final word is that provided they drive on to accomplish these missions, their own growth will continue and even accelerate. “We know what we need to do to propel our proposition forward, and the underlying growth in the APAC markets will then be the springboard for our own accelerated expansion,” Christine concludes.

Getting Personal with Christine Ciriani

Christine Ciriani is the CEO, EMEA and APAC for InvestCloud, with a career of successfully building businesses across Europe and Asia. In addition, she is on the Board of Barclays Private Bank Switzerland and Institute Pasteur Switzerland.

Previously, Christine was Senior Partner and CEO Switzerland at Capco, an international management consultancy, and part of the APAC Management Team, where she launched and led the global wealth and investment management practice and offices in Switzerland and Singapore. Christine started her career at JPMorgan, where she worked for both the investment and private bank in New York, London, Geneva and Hong Kong.

She holds an MBA from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and an Economics and Accounting degree from Claremont McKenna College.

While from her business card, one might anticipate meeting with a dynamic executive of Swiss or Italian origin, she is actually Chinese-American, and as proud of her Chinese ethnicity as of her Californian birthplace. “Both my parents are Chinese, originally from Beijing and Shanghai,” she explains, “but I grew up in California, in Orange County to be precise. It was in some ways the best of both worlds for me.”

Her parents went to the US to study for their Master’s degrees in the 1960s, the days when if you were a foreigner studying for such in the US, students could bring their parents over with them; hence, the family soon became Chinese-American citizens.

While studying at Claremont McKenna College, Christine became the first female student body president, representing the 30% of the campus that was female at the time. With her MBA on top, it was little wonder that blue chip JPMorgan snapped her up for her first job.

Before joining Finantix in late 2019 after what was by then an already impressive 23-year career, Christine was a Senior Partner and Managing Director Switzerland at Capco, and additionally launched and lead the global wealth and investment management practice across 10 locations, including related partnerships and key accounts. She established the business in Switzerland from initiation with responsibility for P&L, strategy, business and people development and was instrumental in building out Capco’s presence in Asia.

Before that she was Partner and head of wealth management for a boutique financial markets consulting firm where she helped establish new offices in Amsterdam and Geneva prior to a company acquisition by Detica (now part of BAE Systems).

She is now a Swiss citizen, and not surprisingly enjoys skiing, although she does admit to not being as proficient at it as she would like to be. “We live in Geneva, and love skiing as a family,” she reports. “Our sons are aged 16 and 13 and far better at skiing than me, but I do manage to get down at least some of the slopes, even on the tough slopes of our favourite resort at Verbier.”

Getting Personal with James Verner

James Verner is President for InvestCloud in APAC, based in Hong Kong. Prior to joining the firm, he was a Managing Director at Legg Mason/Franklin Templeton leading their Digital Wealth business for EMEA & APAC which included making a series of portfolio investments in innovative wealth and insurance technology vendors.

He comes originally from Gosport, a sailing town on the south coast of England and grew up in the UK, albeit punctuated by a few school years living in New England in the US.

His work saw him first connect actively to Asia around 12 years ago, and he was immediately enthused by the life, culture, business and diversity of the region.

“Like many, my first trip was Hong Kong, and I loved it all,” he recalls. “The sights, sounds, smells and the general hubbub were all enticing. I knew I wanted to move out one day, so began working with Legg Mason in 2017, flying in and out of the region, and then moved to Hong Kong three years ago. Despite all the problems of the protests and then the pandemic, I certainly have no regrets at all.”

He recalls first meeting InvestCloud in New York some four years ago. “It was refreshing,” he says, “as I immediately felt we talked the same language on the technology opportunities wealth management. I later met the founders about two years ago, and we started talking about further expansion in Asia, and then met Christine and here I am today. It has certainly been an adventure.”

He explains that his background in building a high growth actuarial technology business and working with highly sophisticated clients had prepared him for the challenges of his current role. “And we built partnership distribution deals in Asia, hence I was flying around a lot, consulting, selling, solving problems, and then went into asset management, focusing on this region,” he reports. “So, the stars are aligned for this mission, and it has been an exciting and positive adventure thus far.”

James is not married currently but has three children aged 16, 15 and 12 and all at school in the UK. “With the lockdowns here, you might imagine it has been tough since the pandemic hit, but many others have been far worse hit than us,” he says.

Spare time might see him struggling into his lycra and fighting the onset of middle age by jumping on his bike and cycling the many hills of Hong Kong. “That involves sometimes dodging wild boars that run out in the road to try and take you off the bike,” he says. “And no, I am not joking. Further afield, I love skiing in the three valleys in France, home to Méribel and Courchevel.”

James reports that he has just moved part-time to Singapore as well, as an easier base at this time for business travel. He expects to spend a couple of months there and gradually visit core clients in the region. “I cannot wait to get out on the road again and see our clients face to face,” he says. “It will all be a bit different from before, but let’s hope the road to normality is not littered with too many obstacles.”