Wealth

Through September 10-11th, Kidbrooke Advisory attended the Robo Investing 2019 Event in London. Existing for over two years, the event has become an excellent platform for knowledge sharing and communication between numerous FinTechs, banks, consultancies and other players of the emerging industry, all across the world. Today we are summarising the core trends and themes discussed at the event. The main topics led the overall direction of the robo-advice offerings as well as tips and tricks on achieving more customer engagement.

In August, we distinguished three themes gaining momentum in the financial industry's innovation landscape. The first one concerns the positioning of the robo-advice on the Gartner hype cycle, from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment. The second trend explores the meaning of sustainability in the provision of financial advice. Finally, looking into the potential flaws of the machine learning-driven models sums up the third theme of the August press on the financial industry's innovation.

This June, we analysed three topics that gain prominence in the context of rapidly digitalising financial industry. As widely known, the machine learning solutions become more widespread in addressing the operational and compliance issues within banks and insurers. However, we highlight that the interpretability of such models is as relevant as their performance. Moreover, in the context of maturing robo-advisory offerings, we see that the common strategy is to focus on the space of clients which are underserved by traditional financial advisors. Finally, we look into the process of building trust by the emerging challenger banks, which may threaten the positions of the centuries-old incumbents in the industry of tomorrow.

The introduction of automated financial advice services did not go successfully for some of the large and reputable wealth managers. As some of the industry players cease their robo advice offerings, we explore the reasons why big banks struggled to tap into the customers' demands. Meanwhile, machine learning solutions continue to expand to various business functions throughout the increasingly digitalising economies. However, little attention is paid towards the quality and the transparency of the decision-making powered by these "black boxes". Finally, in the world of accelerating personalisation standards, it is crucial to expand the innovation efforts beyond the interfaces and use the technological capabilities to improve the actual offerings.