This Online Robo-advisory for Singaporeans Sees 5-8 Years of Growth in APAC Region Ahead of Any Maturity in Digital Wealth Sector Founded by Bhaskar Prabhakara and Rajesh Arjunlal Jaisingh, WeInvest provides an account aggregation and wealth analysis, simplified for the client's customers

WeInvest began as an online investment advisory that sought to advise HNI/UHNIs living in Singapore about the best investment options available across the world.

It soon evolved into a B2C robo-advisory focused on the local Singapore populace. The company further morphed to becoming a B2B2C wealth tech platform targeting banks, asset managers and other financial entities in the SEA, EMEA and North Asia regions.

This was at a time when the market was ripe for such providers given increasing adoption of digitisation by the financial sector, Rajesh Jaisingh, the Co-founder of WeInvest tells BIZ Experiences Asia Pacific.

WeInvest Co-founder, Rajesh Jaisingh

Founded by Bhaskar Prabhakara and Rajesh Arjunlal Jaisingh, WeInvest provides an account aggregation and wealth analysis, simplified for the client's customers.

The benefits of this service include providing better perspectives and insights for clients, making clients more pro-active, increasing cross-sell based on needs identified, more engaged conversations with Advisors and making finance easy and hassle-free for clients. This service is built for retail banks, private banks, brokerages and insurance

In an interview, Jaisingh who spent his early years setting up and running business operations units for Lehman Brothers, HSBC and Junosource and helped WeInvest win funding from multinational asset management company Schroders Plc spoke about what the investment did for the company and its growth plans.

"The funding by Schroders validated the general direction that we had taken as a company. Our Strategy Marketplace suite was considered a great fit to the distribution roadmap of Schroders," Jaisingh says.

The investment allowed WeInvest access to more potential partnerships and deals that we would otherwise not have been able to participate in. With this investment, the company continues to focus on being ahead of the curve in terms product strategy and market outlook.

WeInvest's AdviseWealth, GrowWealth and Strategy Marketplace solutions cover all primary digitisation requirements of banks seeking to make the shift or dive into a particular segment.

Growth Plan

Counting entire focus on Digital Wealth - turnkey products that are configurable, integrate well with existing vendors/partners and seek to pre-empt market needs rather than just meet existing demand as its USP, WeInvest would like to see itself rivalling the likes of FIS, FiServ and Temenos.

In the next 2-3 years, WeInvest would ideally deepen its reach within its existing regions of operation.

"We would also expect a spurt in growth as the first wave of clients enabled by our solutions gain tenure and maturity, in turn, serving as examples of our implementations," says Jaisingh.

He thinks that there is easily 5-8 years' worth of growth and expansion left in the APAC region before any signs of maturity start showing. The company will take a call on how it will expand by seeking feedback from the markets rather than just take a position now. It could be in the form of product expansion apart from looking at new regions.

With over a 1000 medium to large financial entities seeking to evolve into the digitization bandwagon, Jaisingh thinks a significant opportunity for the next wave of Digital Wealth providers to emerge from the Asia region and compete with the more tenured operators in Europe and the Americas exists.

Leadership

Jaisingh says he has been fortunate to have worked with two other startups in the past and have seen both failure and spectacular success.

"Experience makes you more aware of the pitfalls that could derail a startup including in one that is growing fast. It also makes one sensitive to the market's needs, provides the ability to assess what could work versus what is a short-term fad and finally, gives you the inner resilience to handle the marathon that startups are," says he.

He finds WeInvest's biggest strength lies in laser-focus on serving as a one-stop shop in the digital wealth segment providing products that are modular, configurable and highly integrable to work with different partners and vendors that clients have already commissioned.

Jaisingh is confident of continued traction in markets of focus and that the company's continued execution will generate the goodwill and traction that is required for long-term success in this segment.

"Any entity competing in this segment needs to gain trusted partner status to be able to win pole position in any new engagement."