WealthBriefing talked to Lennart Asshoff, CEO at Nucoro, after recent award win about what has made the wealthtech firm stand out this year.
In what’s been a particularly competitive year, it is Nucoro’s client spread that handed us the edge. With each client possessing different needs and objectives, there’s been a diversity to the wealth management projects we have undertaken. As well as demonstrating our ability to address multiple types of client challenge, it meant we could enable thousands of customers to access services they might have felt were otherwise out of reach.
The ingenuity and versatility of our technology is what ultimately empowers Nucoro clients, but it’s our people that make continued success possible. Over the course of the last year, as with previous years, their tenacity, innovation, and determination to ensure solutions perform as intended has made the difference.
Although the immediate needs of our clients is always a priority, behind the scenes, work to improve our proposition is continual. At present, we see that many tech providers are creating products to augment the front-end. Though this improves customer experiences, engagement tools are crucial for product uptake and so our focus is on building the market's most flexible and robust back-end infrastructure. For services to have the longevity and ability to retain customer interest, they need to work seamlessly and we are achieving this through API-led technology that allows for easy integrations, rapid time-to-market, and enables banks to play in the embedded finance space.
Today, Nucoro’s clients are creating digital tools that delight customers, empower financial advisors, and automate the entire investment process. But getting here wasn’t without its challenges. The learning curve around the build and launch of digital investment propositions was steep. By immersing ourselves in the technical, regulatory, and compliance demands that such products depend on, we acquired a much deeper understanding of how banks or financial services firms could launch similar products themselves. We also learnt that D2C products attract high CAC, and for large financial firms to mitigate these, distribution must be more widespread and occur over shorter timescales.
In terms of the pandemic, Nucoro weathered the storm well, but there was some impact. Many of our prospects and customers operated along traditional working lines with little embedded flexibility for remote working. When social distancing mandates were introduced, conversations slowed as working arrangements had to be recalibrated and new software and hardware to enable working from home was introduced. However, the lag was short-lived. A shift in consumer behaviours led to a growing demand for wealth management and investment products and meeting this demand quickly returned as a priority.
As far as long-term changes to the market go, it is clear that more diverse consumer investing is becoming normalised as the likes of pensions, savings, and premium bonds continue to perform poorly. Elsewhere, the fintech boom shows no signs of slowing as retail investors become increasingly comfortable using digital-first services.
Ultimately though, it is the enhanced expectation for wealth management flexibility that’s among the biggest post-pandemic changes and the solution is more nuanced than simply migrating processes and services to virtual investment platforms. The pandemic accelerated the shift to digital-first alternatives, but the need for personalised, human approaches remains. There are important demographic splits that need to be addressed too. For example, we find that women are more likely to prefer the assurances of advice-led approaches, as opposed to a cascade of information relating to products and performance.
As far as receipt of this accolade goes, it would provide important validation of our proposition and further demonstrate to our prospects and clients that Nucoro is indeed the world’s most flexible digital investment platform.
