FinTech

Knowledge Base Articles

Founded in 1855, Skandia is one of the indisputable market leaders in financial advisory services within the Nordics. Throughout its long history, the institution has relied on the expertise and experience of its financial advisors, who earned trust and appreciation from thousands of customers over the decades. Today, as the company transitions to a multichannel, digitally empowered business model, a focused area is the delivery of a superior service through all available channels – from traditional face-to-face meetings to digital financial experiences. Therefore, the insurer strives to build communication channels in a digital space that would match the physical experiences in engagement levels and even improve the service quality in a way that has not been achievable before.

Welcome to our brand-new series describing the elements of digital financial experiences you can build using OutRank API!

Fredrik Daveus, CEO at Kidbrooke®, explores how to build trust in digital wealth management for the Swiss WealthTech Landscape Report 2021 by The Wealth Mosaic.

The financial guidance and advice services, which constitute the life insurer’s core business, were among the first to go through the transformation. Joakim Pettersson, the digital strategy and innovation lead at Skandia, believes that digitalisation is “the only way to scale financial advisory services”.

Evida began its path as a family office managing a wide range of assets for wealthy families. Initially, the Swedish financial advisor outsourced the management of equity and fixed income positions to other parties. However, the combination of their interest for factor-based investments and dissatisfaction with wealth management services provided by the largest banks in Sweden, Switzerland and Luxembourg convinced Evida to build their own digital advisory service.

The modern wealth management industry still relies on the 50-year-old approaches to portfolio management, widely popularized by Markowitz's Modern Portfolio Theory (1952). Despite heavy criticism within the academic circles, the alternative methods remain undeservingly overlooked in practice. In the context of the modern leap for hyper-customization, we look into one of the alternatives to Modern Portfolio Theory in greater detail - the Utility-based approach.

The second part of the “Portfolio Construction”-series explores whether introducing parameter uncertainty to the model would improve the out-of-sample performance of the optimal portfolio. Additionally, the article proposes and tests two adjustments to regular utility optimisation.

In the first part of the ”Asset and Liability Management using LSMC” article series, we outline an ALM framework based on a replicating portfolio approach along with a suitable financial objective. This ALM framework, albeit simplified, is constructed to provide a straightforward replication of the complex interactions between assets and liabilities. Moreover, a brief introduction to the LSMC method used to generate all underlying risk factors is presented.