Article first appeared in BusinessWorld
In the new normal, digital has made it more convenient to do tasks once preferred to be done physically or on-site, from transacting money to trading stocks, thanks to virtual platforms accessible wherever users are.
Likewise, managing your wealth can now be done within your fingertips as ATRAM Trust Corporation (ATRAM), the largest independent asset and wealth manager in the Philippines, has signed a strategic partnership with additiv, a leading global WealthTech platform provider, last July.
The strategic partnership endeavors to utilizing additiv’s orchestration engine in modernizing and digitizing ATRAM’s wealth management platform, which is scheduled to be launched before the end of this year.
Deanno Basas, president and managing director at ATRAM Trust Corporation; and Pieter Zylstra, general manager APAC at additiv, shared about the significance of the partnership to ATRAM and the Filipino wealth market overall.
Why is it so important for ATRAM to modernize and digitize its wealth management solutions now?
Deanno Basas: Being ready for the digital economy has never been more important. Over the past few years, Internet usage and adoption of digital technologies have skyrocketed. So, offering the highest quality digital investment and wealth management services and tools is essential to maintain our position as the leading independent asset and wealth manager in the Philippines.
The need to become fully digital was further highlighted during the pandemic when the accessibility of investment managers and their services was challenged. As a result, this has fundamentally changed our clients’ expectations for instant and digital support and advice, and our advisors’ requirements for relevant customer insights and a holistic view to enable data-driven decisions and related analysis.
To continue to seamlessly meet these needs as they evolve, it is essential for our services to operate on an agile and scalable digital wealth management platform. ATRAM’s strategic partnership with additiv enables us to modernize and digitize our wealth management solutions.
Our new digital wealth management platform utilizes additiv’s award-winning orchestration engine, DFS, allowing us to tailor digital wealth user journeys across a variety of market segments and distribution channels.
Ultimately, our goal is to deliver the best investing experience for our clients and the introduction of this wealth management platform is a big part of that.
Why is the partnership between additiv and ATRAM so important for the wealth management market?
Pieter Zylstra: Fuelled by the pandemic and generational changes, ATRAM’s clients are increasingly embracing digital technology. They also have markedly different views on how and where they manage their wealth, and offering the right digital solutions plays an essential part. Their lifestyle and ethics often mean that they are likely to have different investment preferences (such as sustainable investments), investment styles (opting to be more actively involved in investment decisions), as well as servicing (preferring mobile apps over visits to branches).
To meet these requirements, wealth and asset managers like ATRAM need to have access to a highly agile wealth management platform that enables them to launch smart, engaging, and highly personalized wealth and investment services quickly and easily.
These are exciting times for the wealth management industry globally. The wealth of the rich is expected to reach $82.2 trillion by 2023, with the Asia Pacific region experiencing the highest growth rate, according to the Wealth-X High Net Worth Handbook in 2019. The Philippines, particularly, is heading toward a very large middle class, and the mass affluent segment is rising.
These facts alone demonstrate the enormous dynamics within wealth management in the Philippines, and these also demonstrate the digital vision of ATRAM’s leadership.
What are ATRAMs plans to develop this new offering in the near future?
Mr. Basas: With the pilot-stage successfully completed, the fully digitized solution offers ATRAM’s high net-worth (HNW) clients easy and efficient access to innovative advisory services supported by ATRAM relationship managers from next month onwards. This will facilitate a seamless client-advisor collaboration and enhance growth by offering intelligent and intuitive investment services.
The new solution will offer access to a range of tools, including the ability to set up personal wealth goals and to determine bespoke scenarios to ensure optimum investment decisions — all while managing investment risk.
For the next stage, the digital platform will allow ATRAM institutional and corporate customers to digitally access and transact on ATRAM’s suite of investment products, all while having an instant 360-degree view of the investments. This is certainly in line with the ATRAM’s thrust of excellent service for us to help our clients meet their goals.
Looking further ahead, ATRAM has the ambition to become the market leader in the emerging Wealth-Management-as-a-Service (WMaaS) industry in the Philippines. By partnering with other local financial and non-financial partners, we seek to promote wealth inclusion in the Philippines market by efficiently offering digital wealth solutions to all segments of the market through various digital channels.
To support this ambition, ATRAM plans to make a sandbox available to its partners that will allow the development and integration of innovative products. The sandbox will utilize ATRAM’s market-leading wealth solutions based on additiv’s DFS® platform.
What are the next steps for additiv to strengthen its business in The Philippines?
Mr. Zylstra: Partnering with ATRAM to support their Wealth-Management-as-a-Service (WMaaS) strategy allows the true benefit of additiv’s DFS® platform to be realized at scale. We are looking forward to closely working with the ATRAM team to onboard and launch financial and non-financial brands onto the ATRAM platform, using the earlier mentioned sandbox approach to facilitate new distribution partners to test both the technology as well as the business models for embedded wealth.
With our fast-growing Asian operational team, we are ideally suited to deliver digital wealth solutions in accordance with regional needs and local regulations. We in additive, as an already established embedded finance provider that is uniquely supporting the Philippines in enabling wealth inclusion, believe that we are on track to be the market leader in the emerging WMaaS industry in Asia and beyond.
additiv, headquartered in Switzerland and having regional offices in Singapore, UAE, Germany and Kenya, partners with leading companies across the world to help them capitalize on the possibilities of digital wealth and investment management.
ATRAM’s additiv-powered wealth management platform is scheduled to be launched before the end of this year.
About additiv
Established in 1998, additiv partners with leading companies across the world to help them capitalize on the possibilities of digital wealth and investment management.
additiv’s embedded finance operating system, DFS®, is an orchestration layer enabling financial institutions to access new distribution channels through a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) model. It also allows banking and non-banking providers to embed wealth services into their client proposition. While it supports wealth managers looking for best-in-class Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to deliver better engagement at greater scale.
Headquartered in Switzerland, with regional offices in Singapore, UAE, Germany and Kenya, additiv is supported by a global ecosystem of partners.
About ATRAM
ATRAM Trust Corporation is the first stand-alone trust corporation in the Philippines and is regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). It received its license to operate in October 2016 and is the fastest-growing fund management company in the Philippines, with a growth rate of over 30% in 10 years. It was the first to launch a complete range of feeder funds in the Philippines which provide Filipinos with global investment opportunities. A market leader in the Philippine global feeder fund space with 18 feeder funds, ATRAM Trust Corporation has approximately PHP 165 billion assets under management as of May 2022. Visit www.atram.com.ph to learn more.
