STASHAWAY
Investing and wealth management in the new normal
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DIGITAL REPORT 2021
INVESTING AND WEALTH MANAGEMENT IN THE NEW NORMAL Nino Ulsamer, Co-Founder and CTO, expounds StashAway’s new approach to investment based on customer-centricity, data and automation
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igital technology has the capability to democratise the instruments of financial services in previously inconceivable ways; what used to be tools reserved for professionals are now being made available to the general public on intuitively designed, tech-enhanced platforms. Headquartered in Singapore, StashAway was founded in 2016 upon the principles of providing bespoke, affordable and high-quality digital solutions for wealth management, and it’s a mission that continues to this day. Nino Ulsamer, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, spoke with us about how the company started and its goals in the APAC (AsiaPacific) market. “It was more than five years ago that I met Michele (Ferrario, CEO and Co-Founder), who, at the time, was looking for a business partner to start a new company,” recounts Ulsamer. Ferrario, a successful and experienced entrepreneur with established businesses in North America, Europe and Asia, was dissatisfied with investment
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NINO ULSAMER TITLE: C O-FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES LOCATION: SINGAPORE
EXECUTIVE BIO
Nino Ulsamer is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of StashAway, Southeast Asia’s largest and fastest-growing digital wealth manager for both retail and accredited investors. Previously, Nino founded Personio, a successful web-based HR management platform, and before that focused his career on e-commerce, founding two Rocket Internet-backed companies in Russia. Nino holds a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Munich and was Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He also holds a Degree in Technology Management from the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM).
products offered to him by banks in the latter and wanted to develop something comparable to those in other regions. He immediately went to Ulsamer as his first port of call. A seasoned veteran of the European roboadvisory market, he too shared an interest in a different investment model because of his own experiences. “I didn't know much about investing at the time, but the idea of having a digital wealth manager that acts as a guide for your investing journey and isn’t incentivised by commissions or trying to sell you random products was very attractive.” Bringing on board Freddy Lim, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer, provided the final piece of the puzzle, and StashAway was created. The company calls its platform “wealth management, like it should be” and offers customers a superior investing experience via five key factors: • One low, variable and transparent management fee (calculated by the size of investment) • Knowledgeable customer service agents • Decision-making guided by data insights • Unlimited and free money transfers and withdrawals • An intuitively designed mobile app (currently rated 4.5+ stars) Having founded several tech companies prior to StashAway, Ulsamer states that his primary concern was to achieve “simplicity” in the overall user experience, “Ultimately, what our product does is not actually that simple, but, for the customer, it’s extremely intuitive.” Next, he introduced automated processes to boost cost-efficiencies and keep expenditures low, savings which subsequently benefit users in the form of very low fees. These highly customer-
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StashAway's Founding Story
centric priorities demonstrate the StashAway executives’ decades of experience in the tech sector investment; they know what matters most to the end user, and this is what gives the company its edge. “Our team is now around 150 people strong and that depth of experience translates into our results,” states Ulsamer. Firstly, StashAway now holds a CMS license for retail fund management from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which recognises its compliance with the “highest regulatory compliance standards” regarding audits, capital requirements and more. “Secondly, we’ve built a proprietary investment strategy called ERAA.” Economic regime-based asset allocation (ERAA) is a sophisticated investment strategy that Ulsamer claims was previously only available to high-net-worth individuals. StashAway’s innovation has been to introduce this previously unattainable system to retail customers. “ERAA is
our proprietary investments strategy that powers all portfolios,” he explains. “It's based on the observation that the economy moves through different cycles, and asset classes don’t behave consistently across different economic
“ The idea of having a digital wealth manager that acts as a guide for your investing journey and isn’t incentivised by commissions or trying to sell you random products was very attractive” NINO ULSAMER
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, STASHAWAY
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Zendesk + StashAway: Scaling support in a conversational era
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Wendy Johnstone, SVP & COO APAC, discusses trends in APAC finance, new customer expectations, and why messaging is the future of customer experience
“The Asian finance industry is currently seeing unprecedented changes: digital disruption, shifting customer expectations, and obviously the very challenging economic environment presented by the pandemic,” says Wendy Johnstone, SVP & COO APAC, Zendesk, in reference to the company’s recently released Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report 2021. “Customers have stepped back, re-examined what their priorities are, and adopted new behaviours. They want to connect in a more convenient, conversational, and personal way with brands, and that's really been driven by messaging.” A leading provider of customer service software, Zendesk’s mission has always been to democratise customer service software to help foster better customer relationships. It’s an important mission, particularly at such a turbulent time of change in the finance industry and socio-economic upheaval, and that’s exactly what Zendesk has been helping StashAway to do. “We started working with StashAway back in 2017, when it was looking to improve both its customer engagement and its customer service agent efficiency,” Johnstone explains. “We’ve helped StashAway deliver the world-class omnichannel customer experience it’s known for,”
continues Johnstone. “Customers can use a variety of channels and with a completely unified view, StashAway’s agents don't need to waste precious time manually synching customer data across disconnected systems.” Furthermore, Johnstone noted that “messaging has very quickly become the preferred channel for customers to engage with businesses,” drawn by its convenient, fast and personal nature. StashAway was among the first to deploy Zendesk’s WhatsApp integration when it was launched, and doing so enabled the company to dramatically reduce their first response time to just 30 minutes - significantly lower than the industry benchmark of 24 hours. Shortly following its introduction, she relates that it has quickly become a strong customer favourite. StashAway’s focus on its customers and view of CX as a strategic differentiator has placed it in good standing to address the changing needs of its customers. “It’s a fantastic partner of ours and the relationship has really grown and deepened over the years. A big reason for this has to do with the team,” Johnstone concludes. “StashAway is a digital native, and these are the organisations who we see disrupting the norm and driving the transformation in financial services. It’s taking a very open minded approach to trying lots of new initiatives; Zendesk is very honored to be StashAway’s partner and support its growth.” zendesk.com
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DID YOU KNOW...
ONE OF STASHAWAY’S CLOSEST PARTNERSHIPS HAS BEEN WITH SOFTWARE COMPANY ZENDESK
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Zendesk was founded in Copenhagen in 2007, although it has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco, California. Specialising in support, sales and customer engagement software to fit a variety of needs, StashAway forged an early and enduring collaboration with it. “It’s our support platform; we've used Zendesk from the very beginning and have established a strong relationship with it over time,” Ulsamer explains. StashAway was actually one of the first financial institutions in Asia to use their WhatsApp/Zendesk API. In a case study, we were able to optimise agent performance by 50%. “We're very happy with Zendesk and look forward to continuing our partnership in the future.”
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Left to right: Nino Ulsamer, Michele Ferrario & Freddy Lim
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regions.” Gold, for example, will behave differently during periods of growth than when the economy is in recession. StashAway will monitor the performance of every asset class and then consider value adjustments, comparing the ‘fair value’ of a certain asset and its current price and looking for any harnessable differences. “Out of all this information, we create an optimised portfolio that attempts to maximise medium-term
returns while minimising risk. Our customers are extremely satisfied with the returns that they've achieved so far.” Maintaining the company’s individual vision requires specialised technology, therefore StashAway develops the majority of its technology in-house. “It also means that we can provide a very coherent experience for our customers as they go through the various stages of the onboarding process,” says Ulsamer. stashaway.com
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Available online, the process for signing up can be done easily from a smartphone in less than 15 minutes. The user is asked a series of questions in order for StashAway to understand them and their “risk appetite”. Following standard KYC (know your customer) practices, new customers can expect to be fully onboarded within 24 to 48 working hours. “Using CRM (customer relationship management), we leverage data to understand customer behavior and present the most ideal experience or content to them at any given point in time.” The objective, he continues, is not simply to convert the customer but actually to educate them on their investment journey. “We've always tried to stay at the forefront of technological innovation in general, and that’s helped us build a very strong engineering team. By keeping our
“Our customers are extremely satisfied with the returns that they've achieved so far” NINO ULSAMER
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, STASHAWAY
processes very agile and fast, we’re able to react to customer feedback quickly and therefore able to continuously innovate.” Despite this, however, Ulsamer is clear that there are still challenges to operating in the APAC region. With myriad local regulatory requirements to consider in each area it operates in, the company has to maintain a close working relationship with regulators in stashaway.com
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each territory. “Also, if you look at a customer in Singapore and compare them to a customer elsewhere, they're going to be very different and have separate expectations about the product,” he adds. Therefore, StashAway is careful to conduct market research and interviews with potential customers from the very beginning. Doing so allows it to adjust its product and messaging to cater for those variances. In a clear display of transparency and customer focused innovation, StashAway even helps its customers comprehend complicated clauses in its terms and conditions by adding a ‘translator’ for legal jargon. Despite the difficulties of 2020, success has followed swiftly in StashAway’s wake and 2021 is off to a remarkable start. The company recently announced that it is now managing over US$1bn (SG$1.35bn) in assets, achieved through StashAway’s
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Nino Ulsamer talks about the benifits of Stash Away
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“ Ultimately, what our product does is not actually that simple, but, for the customer, it’s extremely intuitive” NINO ULSAMER
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, STASHAWAY stashaway.com
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ability to generate strong returns in a volatile market. In total, its portfolios have generated annualised USD returns ranging from 17.1% (for its highest risk portfolio) to 5.3% (for its lowest risk portfolio) since its launch in July 2017. In 2020 alone, the USD portfolio 14
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How is StashAway different from other robo-advisors?
“ First and foremost, our goal is to continue to help customers navigate the ups and downs of the market” NINO ULSAMER
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, STASHAWAY
returns ranged from 24.1% to 5.2% respectively, and consistently outperformed their samerisk benchmarks. 2021 will see StashAway exploring opportunities for further expansion within Asia, with the same careful scrutinisation of
market potential and regulatory restrictions that are hallmarks of its general approach. “Typically, when we go into a new market, we try to educate clients and offer a product that previously wasn’t available to them,” Ulsamer says. “But, first and foremost, our goal is to continue to help customers navigate the ups and downs of the market.” His vision for StashAway’s development is the continued refinement of its overall wealth management experience. The world has been irreparably changed by the events of 2020, and how people invest must change with it. Focusing on data, technology and customer-centricity, StashAway will continue to leverage its approach to produce new and exciting results. “We all live in a new reality now, right? Firms need to adapt to the new normal.”
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StashAway
105 Cecil St #14-01 The Octagon 069534 Singapore
T +65 6958 1052 | www.stashaway.com
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