Fundinfo launches Digital Advisor, intelligent fund selector
Matthias Weber, ifund: “Amazon is our benchmark”
Fundinfo says its new cloud-based fund selection system, Digital Advisor, considers “investor’s emotional preferences” in addition to analysing active and passive funds.
In an exclusive interview with Banking Technology, Matthias Weber, CIO of ifund services (fundinfo’s partner business), says the idea of “a versatile online tool that finds the most suitable funds based on qualitative analysis combined with personal conviction instantly” was conceived in 2014.
“A typical fund selection process today takes far too long, relies too much on the knowledge of individual analysts and raises some compliance issues due to limited and outdated documentation,” he says. Digital Advisor solves that problem, he hopes.
The system scores active and passive funds based on “scientific criteria” and “hundreds of man-years of research”. It analyses data about fund houses, fund managers, and their investment processes, and then combines the results with an investor’s emotional preferences and convictions “to instantly generate a list of recommended mutual funds and ETFs”.
Weber is not aware of similar tools in the wealth management industry today, but there are analogues in e-commerce. Amazon, for example, provides a personalised offering within an instant and 24×7. “This is our benchmark,” he tells Banking Technology.
Digital Advisor can be used as a stand-alone tool or embedded into existing investment advisory solutions. Banks can use the plug-in within their advisory services to identify funds that best reflect the current view of their senior investment managers.
The solution can filter the funds according to specific criteria, to match “emotional and financial needs” of the investor, e.g. fund house profile, investment style, sustainability, manager experience, gender, location and so on.
What are the key benefits? Weber states Digital Advisor “dramatically reduces time and money required for due diligence”, reduces time-to-market for new investment ideas (“a matter of seconds, not days”) and enables “tailor made offerings at low costs”.
Earlier this year, fundinfo joined forces with Credit Suisse and UBS to launch openfunds – a Zurich-based non-profit organisation that has created a global standard for the characterisation of investment funds.
