Ecosystems the way of the fintech future
Swiss tech giant, Avaloq, has high hopes for the future of fintech, pointing to an integrated ecosystem of start-ups that could look something like a larger-scale Silicon Valley.
Avaloq’s group CTO, Thomas Beck, told Money Management that, while planners find siloed technology a problem, the solution was not to find one fintech to fix them all.
Beck said leaving a particular solution to a fintech with the skillset to produce it is in fact best practice, but integrating all the vertical technologies on to the one platform would significantly improve efficiency and simplicity of use.
Country head of Avaloq, Anantha Ayer, said the end goal was, at least in terms of planners, to free up advisers’ time to work on producing goals-based advice during one-on-one sessions with the client.
Integrating fintechs on one platform, which may well be Avaloq in the future, would also give advisers and other consumers instantaneous solutions, which would in turn allow planners to scale their workloads even more.
In terms of adopting technology, Beck said Australia was arguably more advanced and more open than Europe and the rest of the world, particularly in using cloud-based technology, and most fintechs here were passionate about connecting on the one platform.
Beck and Ayer said cost wouldn’t be an issue either and looked at the ecosystem as a value-add product that they hoped would someday be to wealth managers what Google is to the general public.
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