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00:00Financial institutions in general are not very good software providers anymore. They don't like building their own software . In addition there's a lot of pressure with robo advice which is another name for what we do. Digital wealth management to actually come to market quickly and with a relevant product. So rather than than build it or go looking for it people team up with us on a partnership basis and they sort of rent the software if you like and develop something themselves. There's a number of financial issues that adopting it create a situation where there's no longer a competitive advantage for one over the other using quantum. Yeah well we don't sell off the shelf solutions we sell a solution that's configurable and customizable and as you can imagine each large financial institution wants something slightly different sourcing slightly unique so whether we speak to an insurance company a bank a broker or a wealth manager they'll all want a different user experience a different user journey. Some of them focus very much on what we call gold based investing which is all about solving retail investors financial goals like educating kids or sending sending a kid to university or retirement brokers for example might focus much more on somatic portfolio investing offering solutions to their customers to invest in driverless cars robotics cyber security and so on. So all of this to highlight that the solutions are very different. How does quantum field usually get started with a wealth management institution. We start with a long discussion on what it is they want. What are their constraints. From a regulatory perspective what are their requirements from. From a client perspective. What sort of clients are they really targeting is that the high net worth. Is it the retail investors the mass affluent. Are they used to trading funds or are they used to using stocks and ETF. And from there we work with them very closely in fact we just have a team based in Taipei working for a big Taiwanese bank working very closely to understand what it is they want to offer. And from then building something that really suits their needs and leveraging their existing brand equity correct always correct always leveraging their brand leveraging their track record leveraging their credibility leveraging the distribution channels that they've already established exactly for decades potentially 100 years and some of these banks and financial institutions have hundreds of thousands of say banking consumers and what they're looking to do is convert very strong banking relationships into now wealth management relationships. Now we come and offer a product that allows them to do this. It's an engaging secure and simple digital wealth management experience so that's what they get . On the other hand what we get is the huge opportunity to grow very quickly rather than developing our own distribution channel and going directly for these consumers and essentially competing with big brands with strong track records. We are leveraging the existing distributions for the I.T. department. Is it a lift in replace or are you taking advantage of all the existing disparate legacy systems that are there. Yeah. That's a very good question actually again something we get asked quite a lot . We slept very nicely on top of the existing infrastructure that no matter how piecemeal undercut right. Yeah. Correct . Exactly. So a lot of these institutions already have a very well-developed system and infrastructure for trading stocks and funds for opening accounts from transferring money from a securities account or from a cash account. We sit on this take advantage of this and offer a much richer wealth management experience which typically they haven't done already. The vendors for those underlying cash management accounts for example or other underlying technologies to those vendors require you to integrate with them in order for the solution to work. And how why would they do that. Yes they do well they do this because they don't have a similar solution themselves . They're very focused the large vendors might want to compete with us but building robo advice solutions isn't just about software. It's also about building the right investment model the right model portfolios. A lot of it right side business rules correct the business rules algorithms for trading managing and rebalancing portfolios which typically a large software vendor can't do. Hence the name quantum field. We have a large team of quantitative analysts PHC qualified with a long track record working for investment banks as as research analysts . What do you say to the critics of robo advisors . Well firstly I dislike the term robo advice. I kind of find it very limited in its thinking and it sort of connote that you've passed on control to a machine a robot precise thinks independently. That's not the case. We've seen very little use of artificial intelligence A.I. in you know so-called robo solutions. The only A.I. we've seen stands for automated investing. And that's ultimately what robots aim to do to automate certain parts. The more mechanical parts of portfolio management leaving the more human emotive element to financial advisors. So in fact many of the institutions we work with aren't in the business of replacing financial advisors or agents . In the case of insurances but actually empowering them saying here's a piece of software for you the advisor or the agent or for your clients that allows you to focus much more on the emotional relationship Bilbray aspect and taking care of the more mechanical scalable parts of portfolio management .

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Quantifeed's Ypsilanti Says AI Empowers Advisers

Financial technologies such as robo-advisors are taking the corporate world by storm -- but their integration has been much more sluggish. In an interview with Globalive Chairman Anthony Lacavera, Quantifeed's co-founder and CEO Alex Ypsilanti talks about makes his products a better alternative to internally-developed solutions. (Source: Bloomberg)

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