The WEALTHTECH Book

Digitizing Wealth Management

By Harald Helnwein

CEO, NOVOFINA

At the Blink of an Eye

Imagine yourself in your car on that country road. You are a bit late for your business appointment. Have you brought everything? It is an important presentation! Trees are flying by while you recite to yourself the opening of the speech you are going to give… or not going to give, as round that next corner – out of nowhere and right on your lane – this ridiculous tractor suddenly blocks you! Somehow, in a reflex action, you miss the tractor. But now you are heading exactly towards that massive alley tree. An instant later, you are dead.

Or you aren’t. At the blink of an eye, the airbag has saved your life!

Now that you are not dead, lean back, relax and blink your eyes. Doesn’t take long, does it? It takes us only 100 milliseconds (1/10th of a second) to blink an eye, the airbag to save our life, or modern stock markets to grow or wipe out all our money.

At the blink of any eye, millions of trades are made at the stock exchange, over and over again. No longer by loud-shouting floor brokers or erratically gesticulating floor traders, but by machines.

Wealth Management is Already Digital

Digital wealth management is not the future; it is the present. Advisors, fund managers, bankers who still think of clients’ money as just being “OPM” – other people’s money – and have not implemented financial technology for the benefit of the customer, will soon be a thing of the past. For the financial ...