Asset Management in the fintech era: trends and news from the community

In the midst of the digital revolution, it is necessary not to lose sight of how the asset management sector, closely linked to the banking sector, is evolving, and how it is involved in a process of disruption. It is impossible to pretend nothing is changing so we decided to go one step further and organize an evening on this topic inviting three startups from our community that will teach us some new investment strategies for different target investors. They are Euclidea, Moneyfarm and Gimme5.

The appointment is on June 5, in our headquarters in Copernico Isola for S32, (via Sassetti 32 – Milan).

Sign up here and follow the live event on our Twitter and Instagram accounts (@fintechdistrict) with the hashtag #talkingheadsFD

Before going into what the individual startups will talk about during the in the evening, let’s see what their point of view is with regard to the current growth of asset management and the challenges the sector will have to face in the coming months.

Luca Valaguzza, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Euclidea, confirms the growth has occurred, “after a difficult end of 2018 due to the negative markets” and observes that in Italy the most important challenges “are played on two irreversible trends and these will substantially change the industry and services that will benefit savers: the entry of digital interaction for the end customer and cost transparency, through the introduction of MIFID2”.

Sebastiano Picone, Business Development Manager at Moneyfarm, also talks about MIFID2. Compliance with this regulation “will be an important test bed for financial intermediaries, since it will have an impact on the customer service model and the distribution model of products – explains Picone – Moreover, the change that intermediaries will have to face in the current context of pressure on margins due to the increasing competition on the costs of investment products will not be a trivial one”. As for the growth of the sector, Moneyfarm speaks of a slight slowdown in the recent past “but it remains sustainable thanks to the enormous growth recorded from 2012 to the present”.

Iacopo Massei, Business Development Manager at Gimme5, explains that digitization “should not be seen as a threat to the asset management sector but as a plurality of opportunities to be seized. Technology allows us to be closer to the customer, smarter in the use of leaner data thanks to the optimization and automation of operational processes, faster in the implementation of ideas, real-time reporting and especially in the onboarding of the customer”.

In the face of the current disruption, the banking sector, which has always been an ally of asset management, is reacting with strong investments in fintech or with partnerships that exploit the strengths of the latter: lean-innovative-open-customer-oriented. Gimme5 is part of the second example, focusing on the collaboration between the Bank and Asset Manager, creating win-win situations.

On June 5 there will be an opportunity to deepen the point of view of the three startups protagonists, starting with the new investment strategies that will be illustrated to the public. Euclidea will talk about “Wealth tech independent”, a term that has become the pay off of the company as it represents it so strongly “In these three words there is our response to the changes that will affect asset management in the coming years – explains Valaguzza – Technology is essential to offer a different service from the past, it must bring both innovation and disruption in a sector that lives on income and must innovate. Independence is essential to offer services and products in the sole interest of the end customer. This is what we, as Euclidea, are proposing”.

Given that the challenges introduced by regulation and cost competition are strongly intertwined with the digital distribution of services and investment solutions, Moneyfarm has chosen to address this issue. “In a phase of the transformation of the industry – explains Picone – the distribution model is one of the elements that will change most to allow the sector to remain economically virtuous”.

Massei will talk on the other hand about small investors. Gimme5 is in fact a startup that, in front of a system that is currently not inclusive, wants “to make savings shareable and encourage new generations to do so, giving useful tools for this and, focusing for example on automatisms which allow you to link habits to saving, so as to encourage the creation of a heritage over time.

Massei will illustrate the dual strategy of Gimme5, which focuses on both the banking system and the end user. “Through an already predefined product, we allow banks to diversify the source of their revenues and to reach a new target of customers – explains Massei – and at the same time we meet the end user who is unfamiliar with the investments but already knows how to save”.

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