vestr is this year’s winner of the Swiss EAM Awards for the Best Portfolio Management Solution.

In an interview with Tom Burroughes, Group Editor of WealthBriefing, Rico Blaser, our co-funder and CEO, talks about active portfolio management with digital innovation.

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What sets you apart from your peers this year and why?

vestr has built the first end-to-end digital platform to solve the industry challenges. Simply by digitising the value chain of actively managed investment products. We provide a white-labeled Software as a Service (SaaS) that allows institutional market participants to actively manage investment products during the product lifecycle.

Compared with a traditional manual process, it not only significantly reduces setup time by an average of 98%. Our solution replaces the email exchange completely. We reduced setting up the Actively Managed Certificate (AMC) from about 300 emails per Actively Managed Certificate (AMC) to zero. In sum, setting up an Actively Managed Certificate (AMC) has become considerably more time efficient. A reduction from 8 working days to 0.2 working days is possible with the vestr platform.

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How have your colleagues contributed towards the success of your organisation?

Our DNA is digital – we build and grow both our product and team culture with digital first in mind. This allows us to stay flexible while also including new team members and their ideas into our everyday work. From issuing Actively Managed Certificates (AMCs) to implementing quantitative models, our knowledge spans across the entire spectrum and we share what we know with one another.

We have grown rapidly from a co-founding team of three to a 30+ headcount across Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Be it new design ideas for our platform interface or new seamless processes for our client support, we trust in the expertise of our colleagues and thus encourage dynamic exploration and implementation of new work practices.

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What are you going to do to stay on the front foot in a fast growing but also challenging region such as Switzerland?

The initial offering focused on Actively Managed Certificates (AMCs), but the technology is also applicable to other investment products, including funds, managed accounts, indices, direct indexing, total return swaps, crypto currencies, and others.

We built proprietary technology designed to be connected to financial market structures (FIX, public API). Therefore, we are in the position to build a full digital ecosystem for active investment management. Our platform can connect to third-party complementors such as independent brokers, market data, ESG and index providers, rating analysts and custodians.

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How has your business and business model reacted to the pandemic?

One of the key achievements in 2020 was the addition of platform features that significantly lower the barrier to entry for new clients. We introduced a plug-and-play solution so clients can go live within a few weeks. Rather than going through a full integration cycle right away. This provides our clients with the flexibility to decide which services require a deep integration up-front, trading off up-front efforts and costs for initial operational overhead.

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What lessons have you learned that you carry forward?

In a two-sided investment market, with legacy technology at large institutions, we creatively balanced customisation and scalability of our solution. With our industry experience as derivative traders, we have a solid understanding of our clients’ requirements. This allows us to offer them the full SaaS spectrum; from a simple setup to get started quickly, to a full integration with fully automated processes.

Download the full Acclaim Publication here and read the interview with our Co-Founder and CEO Rico Blaser (p. 37).

For further enquiries about vestr and our end-to-end web-based platform, feel free to reach out. Get in touch and schedule a call here.

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