Rebecca Isjwara

Family offices in the APAC region delivered 6.2% average returns between Q1/Q2 2018 and Q1/Q2 2019 to outperform all other regions, according to The Global Family Office Report 2019 jointly launched by UBS Global Wealth Management and Campden Wealth Research.

In a bid to improve RM efficiency, offer more convenience to clients, and stay ahead of technological disruption, Asia’s private banks have increasingly relied on and invested in their digital capabilities and solutions. In July, Asian Private Banker distributed its 2019 Mid-Year Private Banking Technology Snapshot Survey in the region to gain a clearer, aggregated understanding of where firms stand in respect to their digital transformations and what their priorities are going forward. Our COO/CTO survey respondents represent private banks with a combined Asia AUM of almost US$950 billion — a decent chunk of the market.

Despite some ongoing trepidation, banks in Asia are increasingly warming to SaaS and BPaaS offerings, particularly when entering new markets given the time-to-market and cost benefits, according to Pascal Föhn, Avaloq group COO, who spoke to Asian Private Banker on the sidelines of the Avaloq Community Conference held in Singapore today.

Personalised advice services in Asia’s private banking space took off in 2014 when UBS Global Wealth Management introduced its digital Advice tool — the first of its kind in the region. Five years on, and the flat-fee advisory model has blossomed as rival banks followed suit to provide tech-enabled offerings that deliver tailored investment advice aligned to their house views.

UBS Global Wealth Management (GWM) has launched UBS Advisor Messaging in APAC to better secure client-RM communications over third-party messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat, according to the bank’s APAC wealth management operating head, Wiwi Gutmannsbauer.

Asia's constantly evolving regulatory landscape is driving the region's private banks to seek advisory solutions that provide clarity, address risk requirements and improve efficiency, according to a survey conducted by Asian Private Banker.

As private banks in Asia continue to invest in technology, Asian Private Banker reviews the milestones that the industry has reached in its 2019 update of AppMap — the most comprehensive roundup of front-office and client applications deployed by the region’s wealth managers. Significant updates and tweaks in the last 12 months include reducing the friction of client-RM communications, upgrading personalisation, and enhancing digital investment propositions.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) development is on the rise, and regulators are scrambling to ensure that the algorithms are fair and responsible. Although the United States and China are two large economies that are making strides in this field, ASEAN still has some lead time to draft and implement the appropriate regulations and policies before its smartest A.I. developers begin to gain traction. Currently, there one crucial problem with A.I.: they are only as smart as the data they feed on. The data sets that are presently used by most—if not all—A.I. developers are still biased and do not represent the population fairly. Biased data lead to biased algorithms, eventually yielding biased outputs. In order to prevent ASEAN from going down this problematic spiral, this problem needs to be addressed at its roots: the data itself. This policy brief recommends a three-prong approach for ASEAN to feed A.I. more representative data.

I set off to university with a limited budget but not necessarily limited dreams. Here's a quick guide I wrote on how I financed my learning trips overseas to Germany, UK, and USA.