TOP INVESTMENT AND WEALTH MANAGEMENT COMPANIES TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2021
The early days of COVID-19 has brought a swift market decline as well as higher market volatility, bringing a negative impact on the portfolios of active investors. The assets under management of investment and wealth management companies were affected as the fees and net income tied to their services saw a consistent drop under low performance.
And as more and more fintech companies pour into the industry, it became tough for customers to know which of these companies have the best technology, financial acumen, transparency, and business integrity to carry out their financial needs. New investment and wealth management companies will need to re-engineer their entire strategy around their clients to succeed in today’s highly competitive market.
“The most important thing that a new and upcoming wealth management company needs to do is, to be honest with their customers and trustworthy,” says Joshua Gerstler, a chartered financial planner and owner of the award-winning financial planning company — The Orchard Practice.
“If clients believe that everything you are doing is in their best interests and trust in the process, then they will be happy to follow you”.
Of course, the struggle to gain market share and recognition for new and upcoming startups will always be greater than their more established counterparts. And the best way to attain growth is to earn a client’s trust.
The best investment and wealth management companies are smart enough to build their business around a unique customer avatar, which provides them with the proper knowledge of their customer’s needs. These specific type of clients will be more inclined to trust them and therefore work with them.
“Just like any new venture, wealth management companies need to have a strong value proposition for a specific customer archetype. Understanding that in the early days, it is much better to focus on serving a particular customer in such a way that established wealth management companies can’t or won’t is paramount for the new firms’ success. For example, a wealth management firm that focuses on supporting female tech founders who recently experienced an exit from their company. Being able to serve that customer and their unique needs is how a new wealth management firm can gain market share and build a strong practice. The niche the firm chooses should target an underserved customer with unique needs that established firms overlook”, says William Glass, CEO & Co-Founder of Ostrich.
“By being focused on a particular customer subset, the new wealth management firm will understand that customer better than anyone else. It’ll make it much easier to find and target those customers because the firm will have an intimate knowledge of that customer’s needs”.
Here are our top established and upcoming investment and wealth management companies that are taking the fintech industry by storm.
Stash was founded in 2015 by former Wall Street traders — Brandon Krieg, David Ronick, and Ed Robinson. It is a New-York based personal finance app that combines investing, banking, and financial advice all into a single platform. With its mission to help everyday Americans to invest and build wealth, Stash boasts over 5 million users. They offer a free subscription on the vesting month and make it super easy for beginners to invest in what they can afford. It allows people to earn fractional shares of huge companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola etc. You can choose their Stock-Back card — which is an everyday card that helps you earn while you shop.
2. Finary
Finary is a Paris-based wealth management platform that offers a net-worth tracking technology to help you track stocks, IRA, real estate, cryptos, startups and everything in-between. It is a platform that allows investors to track all their investments in one place and get real-time analytics on their portfolio to make solid investment decisions. Just 3 months after launch, Finary has tracked more than $2.4billion of their client’s assets. The CEO of Finary, Mounir Laggoune, talked about the company’s mission with UKTech. “Our vision is to become the worldwide leader for investment tracking and optimisation”, says Mounir.
3. Exirio
Similar to Finary, Exirio is a wealth insight app based in Dubai that helps investors track all their wealth in one place. It offers multi-currency and multi-asset tracking of all major currencies, stocks, properties, loans or any other investment. All the wealth of an investor is aggregated in one place, and the information they need to understand what they own and how it’s performing.
4. WealthOS
WealthOS was founded in October 2019, and it is a cloud-native core wealth management SaaS company built to accelerate innovation and digital adoption within the wealth management industry. The company reduces the time for wealth managers to market their products while reducing the cost of ownership.
“For emerging wealth management companies to achieve competitiveness against established firms in the industry, they need to leverage tech and innovation”, says Carol Tompkins — a business development consultant at AccountsPortal.
“This means faster adoption of new and efficient technology to stay ahead of competitors. This technology should help in cutting down operating costs for the company, or helping to serve customers better, faster and more effectively”, said Carol.
WealthOS is off to a good start, as it uses the latest advances in cloud-native technologies to offer the wealth management industry the upgraded technology infrastructure needed to launch innovative digital value propositions.
5. Penfold
Penfold, on the other hand, is a different kind of Investment Company. It offers challenger pension getting young people and the self-employed saving enough for retirement. They offer a digital alternative to traditional pension companies and allow customers to set up, manage and track their pensions online. This is what helped the company to get off the ground.
“Clients should be able to use a self-service app”, says Lyle Solomon, an Attorney at Oak View Law Group.
“People have become adept at using self-service apps in recent years. As a
result, new wealth management firms can develop apps that allow clients to
examine their financial information”, he adds.
Clients with other pension pots can consolidate their pension with Penfold, which is easy, free of charge, and their friendly customer service will manage it on your behalf. They help clients decide how much to save and which plan is right for them.
6. Yieldstreet
Yieldstreet is a management platform that provides institutional investors access to a huge variety of asset classes, each with different returns, durations, and minimums. It was founded by Dennis Shields and Milind Mehere in January 2015, and it offers individuals access to alternative investments that have been exclusive to upper-class citizens.
A recent interview with the CEO and Co-Founder, Milind Mehere, was conducted by AlleyWatch to learn about the company’s vision and progress.
“Access to and distribution of alternative investments is missing, leading to an income and opportunity gap. Yieldstreet was founded to help solve this problem and enable millions of people to generate income outside the traditional stock market”, says Milind.
This was what inspired the start of the company.
“Yieldstreet is reimagining the way wealth is created by providing access to alternative investments previously reserved only for institutions and the ultra-wealthy. Yieldstreet’s mission is to help millions of people generate $3 billion of income outside the traditional public markets by 2025”, he adds.
With over $1.6 Billion invested on the platform, Yieldstreet is now one of the fastest-growing wealth management companies in America.
