The transition from To B to To C is the safest path.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “7:5 degrees” (ID :Asia7_5).
Southeast Asia Smart Investment Industry Financing News
After collecting and sorting out financing news in the new economic field in Southeast Asia, I found that an industry that has not been paid attention to for a long time has a sense of existence within a week, and the amount of financing has also remained at the level of millions of dollars before the “grip” , reached a height of 10 million US dollars.
The first is Singapore’s two old-fashioned smart investment platforms. Bambu and StashAway have received $10 million and $12 million respectively in the same round of investment in B, and there are many Eight Roads like Franklin Templeton and Fidelity International. Ventures (Stuart Capital), the two investment institutions with more than $700 billion, and the other in 1999, led the A round of the giant Alibaba.
Bambu and StashAway, although both based in Singapore, but because of the advantages of online platforms, the market for services spans global investors and financial institutions, the post-financing business focus is also different, Bambu announced that they will get deep after receiving the money In the SaaS field, the service capabilities of the enterprise are further enhanced, and StashAway said that it will further target the retail side. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of registered users in 125 countries. The next step is to enter Singapore’s neighboring country, Malaysia.
Bambu and StashAway are the main players in the smart investment industry in Singapore
And a few days ago, a Fintech company in Thailand Finnomena announced that it was preparing its own B-round financing, and at the same time launched the smart investment service GuruPort. Although Finnomena does not have the top two in terms of speed, it is backed by Krungsri Finnovate, a venture capitalist of Thai financial giant Krungsri Bank, who led the F in 2017.Innomena’s $3.2 million Series A financing.
Development history of smart investment
According to an article published by Industrial Securities entitled “Smart Investment: Technology for the Blue Sea, Nuggets”, we can roughly divide the smart investment that originated in the United States into three stages of development.
1. Online investment stage
In the late 1990s, the technical level and scale of investment analysis tools available to investors for application began to expand. In 2005, FINRA issued the NASD IM2210-6 Requirements for the Use of Investment Analysis Tools regulation, allowing securities dealers to directly use investment analysis tools for investors. Investors can use investment analysis tools to make different investment strategies. The analysis of investment income has better control over income and risk.
After that, the scale of online asset management services has grown rapidly, and more long-tail customers have benefited at this stage. The characteristics of this stage are mainly due to the limited application of machine intelligence. The main application area is portfolio analysis.
2. Robot investment stage
From 2008 to 2015, a large number of emerging technology companies began to provide customers with a variety of “digital investment tools” based on machine learning, and the business model of robot investment began to develop. The functions provided by the customer-oriented investment tools developed by these companies have only been applied by financial practitioners and have been widely used by customers. In many practical applications at this stage, securities companies are responsible for the investment strategies offered by their “digital investment tools”.
3. Artificial intelligence investment stage
From 2015 to the present, deep learning based on big data has been widely used, and artificial intelligence technology has made breakthrough progress. Smart service providers and technology companies are beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence systems that can completely eliminate human participation in the investment management value chain. At present, including Bridge Water, Wealthfront, and domestic wealth management, such systems have been developed and commercialized. Service providers who usually use the “artificial intelligence + cloud computing” architecture have invested heavily in computing equipment and software development (less than 1-2 billion, many billions), and can serve thousands of users at the same time. .
What are the main problems for smart investment?
Customer Analysis: Customer analytics is a prerequisite for providing accurate investment advice that is tailored to your individual situation. At present, the mainstream intelligent investment platform basically uses questionnaires and inquiry scoring forms when conducting customer analysis and portraits.
Large asset allocation: According to modern capitalAccording to the production combination theory, there is an optimal investment in the case of deterministic returns. Most smart investment services use this principle to build a decentralized portfolio. And optimized according to its different business models.
Portfolio Selection: There are two main types, one is to choose different investment portfolios by risk level, and the other is to choose different investment portfolios according to investment style.
Transaction execution: Most smart investment companies basically use their own brokers or cooperative brokers to provide smooth transaction execution services.
Regrouping of portfolios: Portfolio rebalancing mainly refers to the re-adjustment of dynamic asset allocation to static asset allocation if the asset allocation is deviated from the target asset allocation as the market value changes.
Tax Planning: It is a feature of the US smart investment platform. The product automatically provides tax loss and tax saving functions. The specific operation is to sell the assets of the investor’s losses, offset some of the capital gains tax, and buy other similar assets, so as to achieve reasonable tax saving and increase the net income of customers.
Portfolio Analysis: Portfolio analysis is mainly the investment analysis provided by the smart investment for customers, generally including: performance display, performance attribution, risk factor analysis, combined descriptive statistical analysis, backtesting and simulation.
The core strengths and pioneers of smart investment
The core advantage of smart investment is that through the introduction of technology, the labor cost is greatly reduced, thereby reducing the threshold and cost for customers to obtain investment services, and helping to promote the development of inclusive finance. Traditional investment services are expensive and the main customers are high net worth individuals. Smart investment introduces technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, which can quickly process massive amounts of information, conduct risk preference discrimination based on information fed back by customers, and provide asset allocation advice to investors through algorithmic models, which greatly saves professional investment. The labor cost reduces the threshold and cost for customers to obtain investment services, and has the advantages of low threshold, low cost, wide investment, easy operation, high transparency and personalized customization.
According to Deloitte’s latest report on the Asia-Pacific smart investment market, the competition of China’s smart investment is fierce. The giants who have already entered the market are ringing to make small players discouraged, such as the wealth of financial upstart ants. No., Lu Jinsuo and the once-sensational China Merchants Bank launched the “Motoric Intelligence”.
According to Deloitte’s report, the 27 wealth management companies attracted by Ant “Fortune” have already tasted the sweetness, including 70% increase in operational efficiency, 50% reduction in overall cost, and a tenfold increase in daily visitors to the corporate platform. The amount of investment that old customers continue to increase is tripled, and the holding period of all customers has increased by 89%.
In the home base of Singapore’s smart investment industry in Southeast Asia, traditional financial players also have institutions like China Merchants Bank. For example, in 2018, OCBC Bank of Singapore OCBC pushedOut of the RoboInvest investment service robot, specifically for a new generation of investors, the minimum threshold for investment can be as low as S$3,500, or about RMB 17,500. This is a service launched after the partnership with WeInvest, another financial technology company in Singapore. It can automatically monitor and manage the portfolio through algorithms. Such cooperation is a pioneer in the field of smart investment in Singapore’s traditional financial institutions.
The charm and way out of smart investment
For investment consultants and wealth management companies, the biggest shortcomings and imaginations of smart investment fall on the two balance points that the financial industry needs to pinch. One is the experience and the other is efficiency. The traditional financial institutions are all centered on the bank itself, through the main body of the bank to build various channels and carry out a large number of buying and selling operations to improve efficiency, while the new financial is focused on each user as the main body, through continuous innovation of technology and concepts. To improve the experience. One is to sacrifice the experience for efficiency, one is to experience efficiency and it is likely to delay efficiency. It can be seen that the traditional and new styles have their own advantages and disadvantages. Smart investment is not so much a new industry iteration, but rather an industry. Temptation, blind obedience is likely to make the steps too big.
So whether it is Franklin Templeton mentioned above, or OCBC and China Merchants Bank, basically I hope to cooperate with startups through investment or outsourcing projects. The reason for this is firstly the traditional financial institutions. It’s very difficult to have a set of ones to update from the inside, and at the same time, startups can verify their algorithms and applicability through a larger platform provided by traditional institutions.
So we can see that the current smart investment has changed from the initial “immature” pursuit of To C to a more reasonable To B, the latter’s exit channel is also more stable, but also the merger is also It can be divided and then developed horizontally. Bambu’s founder, Ned Phillips, once said in an interview that To C is not impossible, but in Southeast Asia, if a To C player can’t always guarantee a cash flow of $50 million, it’s basically impossible to get in Ant Financial. WeChat, KaoKao and local banks have taken their own path. The transition from To B to To C is the safest path.
Edit: Yunhao@出海
