Aditya Gupta of OCBC: Reimagining digital wealth management
Inside the Sell Side
Aditya Gupta
Head of Digital Business and Transformation | OCBC
Aditya has spearheaded the digitalisation of OCBC’s core consumer banking business and built digital growth engines to augment and accelerate franchise growth. He led the Singapore banking industry steering committee for the launch of SGFinDEx, Singapore’s uniquely advantaged foray into Open Banking and was also a member of the industry workgroups for real-time payments initiatives (PayNow and FAST).
AI and data-advantaged solutions are allowing hyper-personalisation in wealth advisory, whereas blockchain and tokenisation are enabling new asset classes to thrive.
Q. What are some of the emerging mega trends in the digitalisation of the wealth management space?
The first trend is a change in consumer behaviour. Wealth management has traditionally been a high-trust, high-touch business, relying on relationship managers giving face-to-face advice. We’re now looking at a new generation of investors who are younger digital natives who want direct control over their finances. Despite just starting out on their investing journeys, they demand quality advice and instruments, typically those only available to high-net-worth segments. Notably, they are socially responsible investors and are keen to invest in companies that are not only doing ‘well’, but also doing ‘good’.
The second megatrend is the rapid pace of technology and data advancements which are driving new value propositions and business models. AI and data-advantaged solutions are allowing hyper-personalisation in wealth advisory, whereas blockchain and tokenisation are enabling new asset classes to thrive. New technologies are enabling ecosystem-led business models within an integrated network economy.
Thirdly, regulators are nudging financial institutions towards a more level playing field in wealth management. With the advent of open banking and new entrants in the space, the competition in the wealth management ring is becoming increasingly intense.
Q. How did your wealth management digitalisation journey start?
Our journey to reimagine digital wealth management was born out of our core purpose to ‘democratise’ wealth management. We wanted to make quality wealth management inclusive and accessible to all – not just an elite few. To this end, we have been serial ‘MythBusters’.
We changed the industry conversation from a focus on high net worth segments to enabling wealth management access for emerging affluent and millennial customers. To address the trust deficit in this segment, we created bite-sized investments, de-jargonised content, and made investing more transparent and affordable.
As they preferred holistic wealth management, we moved away from product selling and pivoted to omni-channel, goals-based advisory with the launch of OCBC Life Goals. This is an integrated wealth planning tool covering retirement planning, investments, wealth accumulation and protection, with a hybrid advice framework across digital and human advisors. We levelled this up by offering aggregated financial planning with the launch of SGFinDex – providing customers with a one-stop dashboard to see all their financial holdings across the financial institutions in one place, and designing an “all-inclusive” financial planning experience on our digital banking platforms.
In tandem with building up a wealth trading platform offering a comprehensive suite of asset classes for self-directed customers, we empowered our human advisors with mobility and remote collaboration – tools for customer onboarding, advisory, portfolio allocations and sales fulfilment.
We rewrote the digital wealth management playbook by offering ‘beyond wealth’ solutions. Leveraging the traditional adage ‘health is wealth’, we conceptualised and orchestrated an ecosystem where physical and mental wellness is integrated with financial wellness. This is how we came up with HealthPass by OCBC to get doctors and clinics onboarded. On this platform, we provide wellness packages with telemedicine, so customers on our platforms have both their wealth planning and wellness requirements addressed.
Pandemic tailwinds have created urgency around digitalisation and customer engagement models in both self-directed and human advisory functions.
Q. And how has technology evolved since?
Technology advancements have enabled us to offer hyper-personalised experiences. By applying machine learning techniques over rich data, we now offer personalised nudges to our customers by combining portfolio holdings, socio-economic data, risk profiles and investment behaviours. These form part of our three-step digital wealth journey – Discover, Decide & Review – for our customers.
There is a lot of modernisation of our technology stack as well. The more open and modular our technology stack is, the more we will negate the cost and time-to-market advantage that some Fintechs have over us.
Q. How has the pandemic changed the wealth management scene?
The pandemic has exposed a ‘dual economy’ of digital adopters and laggards, leading to an acceleration in the adoption of digital wealth management solutions. Further, pandemic tailwinds have created urgency around digitalisation and customer engagement models in both self-directed and human advisory functions.
We now head into this ‘next normal’ following the Covid-19 pandemic starting from a position of strength, and have doubled down on our ambition to be the regional leader in digital wealth management with enhanced remote client interactions, remote collaboration solutions, agile delivery at scale and future smart workplaces.
Q. What are some of things that you’re excited about in the next few years?
There are new engines of growth we want to scale for value creation in this space. We can enable new and upcoming instruments like cryptocurrency, central bank digital currencies, and carbon offset trading on our wealth trading platform.
ESG is a big play for us, and we believe that it will be an interesting space to collaborate and build a sustainable ecosystem. We have an Impact Investing portfolio in our robo-advisory offering which is one of our top three portfolios attracting capital quarter-on-quarter. 80% of investors in our Impact Investing portfolio are below 40 years old, but we are starting to see the shift in demand for ESG portfolios across age groups with the increased intention to do good for the planet while investing.
Multi-generational wealth transfer is also an area we are watching closely, where we need to pivot the entire client advisory and engagement models to embrace the next generation or risk losing their business. In a way, it is like climate change – while it is prone to fall through the cracks in the short term, the consequences are huge.