In our ongoing series, the FinTECHTalents FinTech of the Week is Nucoro, which offers the B2C robo-advisor Exo Investing and a B2B platform to support financial institutions in their journey to become digital challengers. Melanie Palmer, Nucoro, CMO discusses what wealth management means in the 21st Century at FinTECHTalents 2019.
Watch the video now:
Can you tell us about the move from Exo Investing to Nucuro?
We launched the FinTech, in 2016. We had this idea that we really wanted to democratize access to wealth management, however we could possibly do that. As part of that process, we built a digital robo-advisor called Exo Investing. That was a fully automated, end to end – from portfolio management through to the reporting and billing, something that really stood out in the market.
We got to the point where we could rebalance portfolios on a daily basis and build bespoke portfolios for every single client, which in itself is something that we are extremely proud of. We wanted to use as much of that as possible to have the biggest impact that we possibly could. Exo Investing remains our B2C platform.
Now under the brand name Nucoro, we’ve launched our B2B platform. This is really about empowering insurance companies and banks to be able to become digital challengers themselves. Without having to do these really long, drawn-out digital transformation projects that could take a lot of time and take up a lot of resources – they can get very very expensive. We can essentially become this wealth management bolt-on for them so they can accelerate their journey to becoming this cool kind of FinTech, essentially.
So a shift in strategy but responding to real needs out there?
Exactly. But when you work in FinTech, I think everybody’s aiming for the same thing. They want to help as many people as possible. In wealth management it’s not that easy to reach lots and lots of people because, as a nation, it’s not something that we automatically do. You don’t come out of uni and go: ‘Okay what’s my pension looking like how am I going to invest?’ There’s a huge education piece, a huge mind shift that needs to happen as well.
I think when you look at the distribution that banks and insurance companies have in place, by giving that technology out to them, it means we can reach a lot more people and build products and services that are right for them. If we were doing it on our own it would be really difficult to do – particularly at scale.
What does wealth management actually mean in practice?
I think there’s a very wide spectrum of what wealth management is. I’ve had this conversation a few times where people say: ‘Oh but wealth management is not for everyone.’ Well yes, but it could also mean putting ten pounds into an ISA every month. This covers savings, it covers advice, it covers investing – so anything that helps someone have a better financial future is what I, personally, would encapsulate wealth management. That is the kind that follows the technology that we build.
How can technology support democratisation of investments?
I think the scaling piece is the really important part. Being able to not hire a massive team of people every time you want to offer a new product or service is very empowering. I think streamlining the processes, if they get very complex and uncomfortable and no one really knows what’s going on can cause regulatory problems, compliance problems, which can really start business back. There’s a really big part in streamlining that kind of tech piece.
There was a really lovely chat somebody did on stage at a conference a few weeks ago and they talked about the incumbent systems being spaghetti versus FinTech systems being lasagne. It’s that kind of piece where it’s just so much more efficient that the amount it costs to service per client is so much lower you can reach more people. You can add a new revenue stream and also you can provide a better experience that’s more tailored if you’re not relying on those manual processes.
What are your plans for 2020?
We’re really looking forward to 2020. We’re learning a lot about the space at the moment. The team’s really growing, which is great. Offices all across Europe. For us it’s really building out the ecosystem so that when we work with new clients and we’ve already got the integrations that they need in place. We can be really slick with the implementation of our technology and probably looking further out across Europe as well.
Watch Nucoro on stage at FTT19 here: