Abbove, the wealth planning technology platform, has been awarded as ‘best technology Outsourcing solution’ at WealthBriefing European Awards 2023, congratulations!
Could you briefly tell us what Abbove does?
In short, Abbove’s solution can be considered as a comprehensive wealth planning platform to help financial institutions digitize their complete holistic wealth advice services by improving data management, advisor efficiency and client experience.
We centralize the clients' wealth data, enable its continuous enrichment through a client-advisor engagement interface, and provide integrated tools that facilitate advice and support in a much more holistic dimension.
Why do you think you were awarded in the category of Best technology outsourcing solution?
One of the main objectives of Abbove’s wealth planning technology is to help financial institutions integrate and scale holistic wealth management services, and this in a completely digital way.
Our technology intervenes and digitizes processes on three global levels: to understand the client's global wealth context, serve him with the right solution or advice at the right time and continuously follow him up on a long-term and deeply rooted relationship.
I believe it's our ability to integrate this technology fairly quickly and effectively into fairly complex banking environments that has been recognized. After 6 months of integration and training, our clients are able to offer a high-value experience for their customers.
How are you digitizing the wealth planning process?
In the first place, Abbove helps advisors to completely understand their clients’ wealth situation. The platform is equipped with structured and detailed inventories to store and organize data about a family’s relations, assets, gifts, financial objectives, etc. Connected to this database are different estate planning tools to help advisors serve their clients with the right advice, such as a financial planning tool, inheritance tax calculator and reporting tool. In the last place, the platform helps advisors to monitor their clients’ wealth situation on a continuous basis and to stay in regular touch.
"We aim to help financial institutions improve how they manage, collect, and process their clients' wealth data to provide them with a new wealth management experience."
Holistic wealth advice means consolidating and managing loads of client data. How’s your technology helping financial institutions in their data management?
That’s correct. Financial institutions have a complex network of tools, information systems and processes. A lot of data exists but it is fragmented, incomplete, not harmonized, not standardized, and therefore creates very little value for either the advisor or the client.
Abbove’s technology is connecting the dots of this fragmented ecosystem of tools and data to build wealth data model advisors can rely on to better understand and serve their clients. In addition to this, the white-label wealth planning engagement platform we offer allows both the advisor and the client to enrich and maintain this information up-to-date.
How do you manage to integrate your technology in this complex ecosystem?
Integrating our solution into those to start developing innovative wealth planning services generally has a big impact on the institution. That’s why we developed an integration technology, called the File Integration Framework. Thanks to this technology, our platform can easily exchange data with the ultra-secure data systems of banks and integrate into their complex environment in a short time and with little effort from their side. Specifically, the technology makes it possible to send encrypted data in files from all different kinds of systems to Abbove’s platform that will then interpret the data.
The advantage of this system is that it is agnostic, meaning files can be sent from different systems, from portfolio management systems to CRM systems. In addition, the financial institutions do not necessarily need to dedicate integration experts to this project, people who can export data reports from their systems can do the job. Finally, the file integration framework also performs quality control.
Integration is 20% technology and 80% methodology. How do you cope with it?
Yes, this integration technology alone is not enough to fully incorporate our platform into the bank's offerings and environment. Indeed, implementing our platform means a complete process of digitalisation: established processes will be changed, systems will fit together differently, and people will collaborate in a different way. In other words, change management is crucial. That’s why we developed a methodology that accompanies the implementation of our technology and that helps banks to incorporate our solution from the beginning to the end. Concretely, the methodology consists of three phases: an analysis phase in which workshops with the bank are organized to define the bank’s strategy and discover how our platform can contribute to achieving its mission; an implementation phase in which our platform is integrated into the bank’s processes and their employees are trained, and finally the commercial launch accompanied by the start of weekly meetings where we touch base with the bankers on the use of our platform.
“In short, with our platform, we do not only provide financial institutions with the technology they need to digitize their wealth management services, we also offer them the complete support to bring this project to a successful end. By working hand-in hand with the institutions, we guarantee a successful digital transformation.”
