Nordnet launches Robosave: Where is the Nordic digital wealth management heading next?
On last Thursday, one of the largest Pan-Nordic online banks, mutual fund distributors, and stock brokers Nordnet Bank AB unveiled its new robo-advisory service for its Swedish clients. The new independent robo-advising service is called Robosave, and this move signifies a new strategic direction in Nordnet’s overall story. Nordnet has a long history, alongside its main Swedish-only competitor Avanza, of continuously launching new innovative financial services. In the past, Nordnet’s value proposition, as has been noted by Pekka Puustinen in his great book FinancialServiceLogic: In the Revolution of Exchange in Banking and Insurance, has revolved mainly around the promise of functional value (and associated benefits). Nordnet has focused primarily, but not exclusively, on streamlining internal operations, extending the benefits of its various services beyond the plain vanilla retail brokerage (e.g. trade capture, clearing & settlement, and reporting) – all that are essential hallmarks of a value proposition constructed around the promise…
Why I wasn’t so surprised that Deposit Solutions acquired Savedo?
Allowing access to rich data sets through APIs will create a whole generation of financial service solutions. What will become very interesting is seeing how other industries as well as emerging Fintechs and start-ups might begin to use this data to augment services, or create new ones. – Kent MacKenzie, Director (Deloitte, 1.6.2017) It was confirmed on 15 August 2017 that German-based open banking and savingstech start-up Deposit Solutions (established in 2011), backed by Peter Thiel and various other well-known venture capitalists, has acquired its German-based rival Savedo. Deal terms were not disclosed. 1)Lepak, S. (2016). “Why terms of acquisitions are not disclosed?”. CoFoundersLab Discussions, 20.9.2016. As noted in the official press release by Deposit Solutions, With the acquisition of SAVEDO, Deposit Solutions is further expanding its B2C capabilities, adding more than 18,000 registered clients, 13 partner banks and two new regions – Austria and the Netherlands – to its existing…
Book Review: FinTech Innovation by Paolo Sironi
There is no lack of differing opinions on the future of wealth management as everyone wants to be heard. We know for sure that the future of wealth management industry is most definitely shaped by the influx of new technologies, significant global regulatory turbulence, and various changes in the customer behavior. So what else is new? We have recently witnessed how new players have entered – with great success – to areas of the financial services industry that were considered off-bounds for innovative new entrants, and even the mainstream C-suite is constantly talking about going all digital. 1)Financial Times (2016). Barclays UK sees digital technology as crucial to its future. [Accessed 3 Aug 2017] It’s no wonder that the wealth management industry is very keen to understand how the complex equation of growth versus profitability is supposed to work in the era of growing revenue and expense pressures combined with…
Chatbots are coming your way: Start moving now!
There has been a lot of interesting discussion on how bots, and especially chatbots, could redefine the future of customer service and customer experience. The rise of bots has been exceptionally fast, and Facebook played a significant role in the chatbot revolution when they announced in April 2016 that Facebook Messenger platform supports chatbots – the number of chatbots on Facebook Messenger has been growing fast. We have been living in the world of (chat)bots for a couple of years now, and Facebook’s adoption of chatbots has been a significant landmark in the more general adoption of bots. There has already been some evidence that chatbots are gaining legitimacy amongst consumers. According to Aspect Software Research’s report published last year, “44% said that if a company could get the experience right, they would prefer to use a chatbot or automated experience for CRM.” This discussion has been, of course, promoted mainly by those…
Chatbots for wealth management, trade execution, and portfolio management? Yes, please!
Chatbots are gaining some momentum in the financial services industry in Finland. OP Financial Group has been at the forefront of launching a relatively large amount of experiments. Other Finnish banks and financial institutions have been rather passive but at the moment OP Financial Group is setting the bar quite high. Kotipizza’s collaboration with OP Financial Group is an example of a transactional chatbot for ordering food (simply order through Facebook Messenger and pay with Pivo app), last year OP’s Pivo Penni (a chatbot for students) turned out to be a short-lived test, and in addition OP launched an invite-only financial management chatbot Pivo Alfred (spending analysis) last December. Unfortunately, there has been no further news about S-Bank’s collaborative chatbot project since last year. In the US, many banks and other financial institutions have already deployed chatbots. As many commentators have already pointed out previously, there are various forms of chatbots ranging from customer service,…
Why banks and insurers innovate so differently?
There are certain things you learn the first day at business school: all firms compete at some level with each other for revenues and to outperform their competitors, companies need to have a competitive advantage (and sure, there are various forms of coopetition). In today’s fluid, dynamic and highly uncertain competitive environment, businesses constantly need to prop up their game to keep up with the sudden changes we are now witnessing. The fundamental question, after all, in strategic management, is not why competitive advantage is so crucial but instead how to gain and sustain competitive advantage over time (Helfat et al. 2007; Teece 2009). Competitive advantage takes various forms, but something that has been stressed over and over again in the academic literature is the paramount importance of continuous innovation to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (Lengnick-Hall 1992; Lord, deBethizy & Wager 2005; Afuah 2009; Betz 2011; Dereli 2011; Weerawardena & Mavondo 2011; Pisano 2015). The wisdom of this maxim…
The new retail deposit marketplaces are here, and they are not messing around
It’s well-known that retail payments, accounting, e-commerce solutions, merchant acquiring and retail lending are the most well-developed and quickly matured segments of the fintech industry, both regarding executed deals, the number of investments, and compound annual growth rate (see Tanaya Macheel’s post on fintech funding). This should not be very surprising as there are still various low-hanging fruits ready to be grabbed by innovative new entrants. It's important to have a plan for #fintechs. Growth is coming from #insurtech & #assetmanagement. Don't forget #regtech #finnishfintechtalks pic.twitter.com/rMDblb82UV — Thomas Brand (@thlbr) May 4, 2017 We are still waiting for similar momentum to gather pace in coming years in multiple other parts of the financial services ecosystem, e.g. corporate finance, corporate payments, SME lending and asset finance, and insurance. It’s true that from the perspective of basic banking products and services, financing and credit have already been hit hard by the fintechs on all fronts by alternative finance…