In brief: New wealth management service targets HNWIs with prebuilt investment portfolios

Fusion Asset Management has launched Wealthinity – a new platform created to empower financial advisors, wealth managers and private banks, as well as small to medium firms to offer ‘customised investment solutions, service their clients faster and drive business growth, without any additional costs’.

Wealthinity offers advisors access to a range of pre-built investment portfolios catered for a wide range of clients - from portfolios made of passive ETFs for Retail investors to portfolios built out of structured products for HNW clients. Advisors can also customise client portfolios or construct their own, maintaining full control and ownership of the clients and the investment process.

‘In recent years, an increasing number of smaller wealth management and financial advisory firms have struggled with growth, due to failing to compete with larger financial institutions and absence of active coverage by large banks,” said Taras Rybak (pictured), co-founder of Wealthinity and head of investment solutions of Fusion Asset Management. ‘This is because they lack resources, ranging from in house investment expertise, research and technology through to access to a wide range of trading counterparties.’

The new dedicated service also offers a web-based portfolio portal, enabling advisors to complete the full client service cycle in just 15 minutes, from fact find and risk assessment to creation and execution of customized client portfolios. Wealthinity portal is operated by Wealthinity Limited, a spinoff of Fusion Asset Management, an institutional asset manager that combines extensive market experience with a quantitative approach to portfolio construction and risk management.

Avaloq completes Derivative Partners acquisition

Cloud platform and service provider for banks, wealth managers and investment firms Avaloq has closed the acquisition of Swiss structured products specialist data provider Derivative Partners.

Derivative Partners will continue to operate as an organizational entity, with all staff transferring to Avaloq. With the addition of Derivative Partners’ analytical services, Avaloq now offers independent valuation, trading and management of financial instruments.

The acquisition highlights Avaloq’s strong market confidence and underpins its ‘vision of reinventing the financial experience in a fully digitized, always-on and data-driven world through powerful data analytics’, said Juerg Hunziker (right), Avaloq’s Group CEO.

Derivative Partners provides solutions for structured products to more than 40 market participants in the Swiss market including issuers, private banks, asset managers and exchanges with valuations of option-linked securities and complex financial products. The firm also calculates regulatory figures and portfolio management ratios as well as third-party valuation models and provides quantitative support for investment banking and trading divisions.

The financial terms of the deal have not being disclosed.

UK trade body expands its ranks

UK FCA-regulated non-banking issuer and index provider Cirdan Capital Management has become an executive member of the UK Structured Products Association (UK SPA).

‘It's a honour for us to be able to share ideas, thoughts and suggestions with the regulators in UK and Europe as well as to be part of the most important network of structured products issuers,’ said Cirdan’s chief executive Antonio DeNegri (right).

UK SPA provides a unified voice for its members, working with regulators, financial advisers and other trade bodies. The trade body serves a number of functions including engaging with regulators, developing best practice guidelines, educating the investment community and providing a useful source of information for manufacturers, financial advisers and retail investors within the UK.

Cirdan Capital Management entered the UK structured products market in December 2018 as the first non-credit institution in Europe to issue and list its own structured product as well as launching a series of third party managers on its exchange traded notes (ETN) platform. 

Swiss market turnover up by 7% YOY

Third quarter 2019 turnover in the Swiss market stood at CHF94 billion, clearly above previous year's level, according to the latest report form the Swiss Structured Products Association (SSPA)

The industry’s turnover in the third quarter of 2019 stood at CHF18 billion or 24% higher than in the prior-year quarter; while the turnover in the first nine months amounted to CHF267 billion, 7% higher than in the same period last year.

Almost half of total turnover (44%) was generated by yield enhancement products. Nominal turnover of participation products more than doubled compared with the same quarter of the previous year, accounting for 28% of sales at CHF26 billion.

The turnover share of leverage products now amounts to 17% and capital protection products account for 11% of quarterly turnover. More than half of all product turnover (58%) is based on equities, 23% on foreign exchange. The most important currencies for structured products are USD, EUR and CHF, accounting for 90% of total sales.

‘In the third quarter, yield enhancement products in particular were again used to generate returns in low-interest phases and to further optimise the investment portfolio,’ said the SSPA chairman Markus Pfister (right). 

Nextmarkets eyes zero-commission structured products trading

German FinTech Nextmarkets has launched a new generation of apps for the market allowing stocks, commodities, indices, and cryptos to be traded without leverage. The new app also allows equity long positions to be traded without additional financing costs or other fees.

The new apps are aimed at investors who don’t want to hold stocks physically and prefer contracts for difference (CfDs) to invest in shares without fees or other hidden costs.

The German startup is also seeking permission to provide portfolio management services with the goal of offering an integrated digital asset management product.

‘Of course, if you prefer to trade the stock physically, we’ll be able to do so in a few weeks,’ said Dominic Heyden (right), co-founder, and CTO at Nextmarkets. ‘Then zero-commission trading in equities, ETFs and structured products will be possible.’

Established in 2014 in Cologne, Nextmarkets has developed a technology named Curated Investing aimed at helping private investors to operate more successfully and effectively on the stock exchange.