Melbourne-based investment platform OpenInvest has launched the OpenWealth service, an online platform providing financial advisers access to their investment portfolios and keep clients up to date.
The firm hoped it would help advisers deal with the advice gap by helping give greater access to professionally managed investment portfolios through advisers.
“Via the OpenWealth platform, the technology does the heavy lifting, empowering consumers to choose and sign up to a managed portfolio and, thereafter, to maintain an ongoing engagement with their portfolio manager – via technology,” the firm said.
Andrew Varlamos, OpenInvest co-founder and chief executive, said the firms already utilising their service did so because they wanted to help a wider audience.
“To put it bluntly, to help more than those who are already wealthy,” Varlamos said.
“Yet until now, they have had to regularly turn away people, simply because the economics of the traditional approach required it.
“Now, using OpenWealth, they can serve an entirely new cohort, distributing and being paid for their intellectual property, in a cost-effective way.”
The service would hopefully create a better investment environment for the millennial and Gen Z demographics which Varlamos said had signed up to online share and cryptocurrency trading sites in significant numbers.
“I take particular personal satisfaction in enabling experienced wealth management firms to take their investing approach and wisdom out to young Australians, who are currently being bombarded with online advertising telling them that trading is fun and that easy profits are just a few clicks away,” Varlamos said.
“We have designed OpenWealth so that firms are not only managing portfolios but providing valuable financial education as well.”
