The name ‘Avaloq’ may not be very familiar, but the wealthtech provider’s clients are likely to ring a bell.
With Canaccord Genuity, Evelyn Partners and RBC Brewin Dolphin among its stable of clients, Suman Rao, managing director for the UK and Ireland, says the provider – whose offering ranges from the front office to the back – is now setting its sights on mid-size wealth managers.
“What we are doing as a priority is to create a value proposition for the mid-size wealth management space,” she says.
“We all know about the fee pressure on wealth management firms, the need for operational efficiency, because they've got to cope with the cost to serve. Also, they've got this fierce competition because of consolidation, but also from their peers within their space.”
In that vein, Rao describes a pre-integrated, software as a service (SaaS) comprising client relationship and lifecycle management dashboards; client engagement channels; Aladdin Wealth for portfolio analysis; automated proposal generation and rebalancing for discretionary accounts; and, finally, Avaloq Core, which enables wealth managers to offer products of any complexity, and therefore mid-size firms to offer clients the same investment universe and strategies as their larger peers.
“It’s built for a set of standardised use cases that we believe a wealth manager would need to operate here in the UK,” says Rao. “So it's an out-of-the-box, standardised offering that we can package up.” Delivering it as a SaaS ensures constant availability and updates, she adds.
Indeed, at Avaloq there is an “entire function” responsible for monitoring and enabling its systems, making sure that the provider’s client base in the UK and across the globe, from universal banks to small regional wealth managers, are up to date and compliant.
“We take the responsibility, we share the burden of that. Why does it work for us? It's the way the Avaloq platform is built.
“The software architecture means that the risk, the effort and the cost is shared amongst the client community. GDPR is a European regulation. Avaloq implemented it in the Core once, and rolled it out to everyone.
“You've got the ‘EMIR Refit’ rules, which went live [in April] in Europe, and it's going to go live in the UK in September. For our entire European community, we did it once; we will then make sure that how we did it for the European community works for the UK, or make those additional changes and go live.
“The way Avaloq – its product, its platform and services – is built is to leverage economies of scale. And it's a massive advantage for savings for our end-client community.”
Another way in which Avaloq keeps up to date is by investing a quarter of its software revenue into its products and services, which the Swiss-based provider has continued to do after its acquisition by Japan-based NEC that completed in December 2020.
