Ask young people these days about investing, retirement saving, or health insurance options, and you’ll probably hear a heavy sigh or the infamous “Okay, boomer” as a response. Many of them simply don’t know where to start and have choice paralysis every time it comes to wealth management. Luckily, wealthtech was born to rescue millennials and zoomers from this gloom.
Wealthtech companies focus on helping users grow and retain their money, as opposed to spending it. Even though wealthtech is a new kid on the block, it is gaining momentum quickly. In the last year, wealthtech received a record-breaking $15 billion dollars in funding. Judging from the first three months of 2022, the market isn’t likely to slow down any time soon.
Wealth tech funding from 2017 to the first quarter of 2022
If you want to further heat up the market by building your product, JatApp is here to tell you about some major wealth management industry trends. But before we dive into the juicy stuff, let’s recap what wealthtech is.
What is wealthtech?
Wealthtech is one of the fintech branches that deals with technologies to change the way people manage and earn their money. The main goal is to offer products that improve users’ ability to invest and handle their wealth. The recent research by the GlobeNewswire shows that the wealth management industry is predicted to grow from $54.62 million in 2021 to a shattering $137.44 million in 2028, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.1%.
Types of wealthtech products dominating the market
From the types of wealthtech solutions today, your eyes can run up. For you to get a clearer idea of what niches are the most promising, we’ve gathered a list of top categories in the wealthtech sector.
Robo-advisors
Robo-advisors are probably the most popular type of wealth technologies today. Robo-advisors are financial services that rely on machine learning (ML) algorithms to provide users with digital wealth management recommendations. They offer highly customized pieces of advice based on investors’ goals, risk tolerance, preferences, and stuff like that.
Robo-advisors help investors cut down costs thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) that replaces the need for human intervention. As a result, investments have also become more popular among people who can’t afford buying services from financial advisors made of flesh and bones. These days, more than 200 robo-advisor agencies operate in the U.S. market.
Wealthfront is a popular robo-advisor solution that facilitates diversified long-term investing. The tool helps to rebalance users’ portfolios, minimize their taxes, and address unnecessary risks. With this robo-advisor, users get the interest on their cash, which is 15x the national rate.
Wealthfront cash account
Robo retirement apps
Creating a retirement portfolio can be a daunting task even for seasoned investors. However, fintech is seeing a rapid increase in robo retirement solutions that focus on retirement saving accounts, like 403(b), 401(k), and IRA. The main purpose of such apps is to assist individuals as well as companies in managing their savings plans.
For you to give a clear idea of this technology, here’s a quick look at RobustWealth. The fintech application offers users retirement savings strategies, delivers an automated and personalized tool to save money, and enables them to calculate income protection needs.
RobustWealth wellness planner
Online brokerage services
Online brokerage software helps clients, insurers, brokers, and policyholders “meet” with each other. Big data analytics along with ML aid users to automate decision-making, investment portfolio management, and data analysis.
Social investing is one of the most well-known types of online brokerage services. With this platform, users can see the investments of their friends in the newsfeed, which resembles a Facebook feed. eToro is an example of a social investing tool that lets users buy crypto, stocks, and exchange-traded funds (EFTs), discuss investment strategies, share ideas, and learn from each other’s experience.
eToro app functionality
Micro-investment solutions
With micro-investment apps, people no longer have to mint money to start investing. Users can fund small amounts regularly, which helps them save large sums over the years. In most cases, all their sacrifices end with small subscription fees on a monthly basis. However, there are also tons of platforms that are free to use.
Meet Acorns, a popular micro-investment solution. When users connect their cards to the Acorns’ investing app, each online purchase is rounded up, so that the remaining money is invested in assets. If, say, matcha latte costs $4.35, the spare change, $0.65 in this case, is automatically invested, helping users to save in the background.
Acorns app functionality
Major wealth management trends
Before building a wealthtech product, it’s essential to understand where the market is heading. We’ve compiled a list of major trends we recommend you study to thrive in the sector.
NFT is not a “monkey business”, but an investment opportunity
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) mean that a token is unique and can’t be replaced by another token of a similar kind. While a euro is a token that is equal to another euro, Van Gogh’s Starry Night is non-fungible, as there’s no other identical painting. On the NFT marketplaces you can find exclusive digital assets, such as drawings or songs, valued as much as physical objects in the real world. This opens up radical new opportunities for investments, meaning that users can buy, sell, bid on, and collect digital items.
Axie Infinity, an online video game, has become increasingly popular in Southeast Asia, managing to sell $2 billion worth of NFTs. In many Asian countries with unstable economies, it makes much more sense to work in the NFT marketplaces rather than to have a conventional job. Such virtual communities are likely to become the workplaces in the next several years. If you think it’s far from the truth, think about Youtube when it was the site for photos of dogs on skateboards. Today, thousands of users make a living by generating content on this platform.
For instance, below you can see one of the digital paintings that I bought on the Binance NFT marketplace.
The drawing was worth $78.63 the day it was purchased. A couple of months later, however, this token has increased in value, reaching $355.24 (“cha-ching”).
NFT as an investment opportunity
Wealth managers embrace wealthtech rather than compete with it
With the rise of wealthtech, wealth managers have also started to rely on digital solutions in their work. Thanks to these technologies, managers can offer a great variety of services to their clients, while ensuring a more customized experience.
Today, there are a range of startups that focus on building products designed specifically for wealth managers. These solutions allow them to better meet customers’ demands, improve client relationships, offer data-driven advice, deliver detailed reports, and enhance client onboarding by better analyzing their needs.
Socially responsible investing is moving from “all-talk” to real action
One of the most prominent wealthtech trends today is socially responsible investing or also known as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and impact investing. This is the kind of investing that prioritizes organizations that focus on sustainability issues. The Morgan Stanley survey suggests that 85% of investors were considering sustainable investing, which is a significant leap compared to 10% in 2017. According to the same survey, millennials and zoomers take into account ESG factors when choosing between their investment options.
It is predicted that ESG investing is here to stay for the next few years. A Bloomberg report shows that ESG assets may reach an earth-shattering $53 billion by the end of 2025, making up one-third of the global asset classes.
Younger generations are all about highly personalized wealth management
Younger generations crave for tailored experiences and don’t mind sharing their data to get it. In fact, they got used to receiving the content and features aligned with their specific needs, often without even lifting a finger.
Wealth managers are service providers that young investors tend to find reliable, and, therefore, willingly trust their data to them. ML, AI, and big data analytics are tools helping managers to better understand clients’ wishes, as well as means to satisfy their needs.
At the same time, full automation is merely something most clients are looking for. This is why a hybrid approach comes into play. Customers want to choose whether to utilize a self-service approach or delegate the tasks.
More community-based platforms will pop up in the future
The future of wealth management technologies seems to be community-oriented. Inspired by social media strategies, many modern wealth management firms create solutions that help users connect with each other, while also engaging in the investment activities.
For example, the UK-based startup called Shares has a social twist, apart from its main feature, such as trading shares. More specifically, the social media platform is integrated into the wealthtech solution, so that investors can track friends’ moves and engage in discussions with others directly from the application.
Shares app functionality
The wealthtech market is blazing hot, waiting for you to join
Now that you’ve learned more about the current trends in the wealthtech sector, we bet you’ve become confident enough to enter the market. One thing that might still be bothersome is where to find technical expertise to build a robust wealthtech app that can shake up the sector. We’ve got a short answer to that: at JatApp.
Our company has been specializing in fintech and wealthtech solutions for more than seven years now. We have more than 200 projects under our belt, many of which are wealth management solutions. Also, most of our clients cooperate with us for three years on average.
Need technical gurus? Click this contact us button to reach out to them.
