Imagine a room filled with MIT Sloan graduate and PHD students along with an impressive list of FinTech experts. Now imagine Mark presenting to this world at the MIT Third Annual FinTech conference about wealth management. Mark used the opportunity to discuss how wealth management is changing, as well as how large financial institutions and start-ups are working together.  

Appropriate to our theme of UX/UI for this issue, there were many questions concerning how the buyers of wealth management will interact robos and humans. We continue to believe that the augmented human advisor will win as wealth managers will need to make use of the tools that make their lives much easier, but still trust their instincts. For example, if FinTech can remove the 80% of low value work of a WM practice they will create the time managers need to focus on the behavioral aspects of motivating investors to save more and invest wisely.

This 20% that matters will need new interfaces. There may be apps that remind an investor to stay on track for their savings goals and remind them of good habits and reward them, perhaps by gamifying their modified savings actions.

The wealth advisor will need to assist  in uncovering the topics that matter to an investor. What is their relationship to money? What values are they trying to impart to their children? When do they want to retire?  

We see FinTech start-ups finding ways to use data to make this process easier by creating new ways for users to interact with the data. In many ways FinTech will create new ways to interact with the investor’s behaviors leading to a smarter consumer led by non-emotional user experiences to guide them.

It is a brave new world for the incumbents as they conduct interesting experiments to find new ways of working on innovation and with start-ups. The incumbants will want to fail often and fast and not bet too much on any one idea. We are already seeing the best adopting this approach.

Mark Casady
General Partner Vestigo Ventures