Endowus Sees Over 20x Growth in Accounts and 7x Growth in Assets Under Advice in the Past 12 Months

Endowus.com, one of Singapore's leading MAS-licensed investment platforms and the only digital advisor for the Central Provident Fund (CPF), has announced strong performance in the one year since its public launch in October 2019.

According to the Endowus Wealth Insights 2020, the FinTech has seen 20x growth in accounts and a 7x increase in Assets Under Advice (AUA) during this period, the firm said in a press release.

On its journey to building a complete wealth platform that caters to all Singaporeans and their unique investment needs, Endowus launched two new solutions in 2020: Cash Smart on 30 June -- an innovative cash management solution -- and Fund Smart on 22 October -- a solution that allows investors to build portfolios from a selection of institutional share-class and trailer-fee free funds curated by the Endowus Investment Office.

These new offerings were based on two surveys Endowus commissioned -- the first to identify investors' cash management preferences, and the second to understand investor portfolio customisation preferences -- and both of the resulting offerings have seen success. Since Cash Smart's launch, Endowus has seen an over 100% increase in funded individual clients over SGD100 million deployed into Cash Smart portfolios in a span of 3 months.

Gregory Van, Founding Partner, Endowus, said: “Endowus is focused on conveniently, securely, and holistically serving clients across all sources of wealth and investment goals. From flexible and very low risk alternatives to fixed deposits, to the most diversified equity funds in the world, it is our job to make sure clients have the highest probability of success with the best products at low cost.”

“We lead the fight for fair fees, where clients can directly access institutional share-class funds managed by the top fund managers in the world -- such as Dimensional and PIMCO -- and receive 100% trailer fee rebates if any sales commissions are paid out to us.”

“The success we've seen in Singapore this past year proves that our formula works, and we hope to grow our team further and expand our reach within Singapore and to more countries in the near future,” Van continued.

Leveraging Technology For Better Investing During the Covid-19 Pandemic

As the first-and-only CPF digital advisor, Endowus places importance on offering clients a fully digital and seamless experience for CPF, SRS, and cash -- from sign up to monitoring performance, to creating new goals and executing transactions.

This technology-driven approach was especially crucial during the circuit breaker period in the first half of the year, when investors had to rely only on digital channels to access financial thought leadership and investment insights. To address this, Endowus was quick to pivot to webinars that have garnered more than 72,000 views, with a total watch time of almost 18,700 hours.

Investors can now also choose between Endowus' fully responsive web platform that works across all mobile devices and browsers, or the FinTech's newly launched mobile app. Available for download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, the long-awaited app allows clients to create goals on-the-go and monitor investment performance.

Responding To Changing Investor Needs

Despite huge fluctuations in the global stock market owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, Endowus has observed relatively little change in client activity and behaviour, suggesting that clients kept to their goals, and did not modify their risk allocation because of market volatility.

Further, the percentages of clients making investments versus redemptions, among all clients, showed only mild fluctuations through the market volatility. Investment inflows outpaced outflows by 3-4x in March and April, a good sign that clients were mostly unfazed and remained steadfast in their investment plans during Covid-19 induced market volatility.

Samuel Rhee, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, Endowus, said: “The investment insights we've observed just in the first half of 2020 echoes our strategy that time in the market is more important than timing the market. Seeing our clients choosing to remain invested and not give in to fear or greed is a great win for us, because it shows they not only believe in our evidence-based investment philosophy, but have seen tangible results.”

“We are confident in growing even further in 2021 and beyond, as more investors realise the benefits of long-term investing,” Van concluded.