FintekNews is pleased to offer our weekly feature column “3 Questions With”. Each week, we feature a thought leader within a unique sector of fintech and ask them to answer just 3 questions for our audience in their vernacular. This week, we’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Ko Matthews, CEO of InvestmentPOD, the industry’s first digital advice platform to offer multi-strategies through a revolutionary approach for advisors to offer their clients sophisticated investing strategies, customizable portfolios, and enhanced trading and rebalancing capabilities.
NAME:
Jacqueline Ko MatthewsTITLE:
CEOCOMPANY:
InvestmentPodWEB ADDRESS:
www.investmentpod.comWhat does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
InvestmentPOD is the industry’s first digital advice platform to offer multi-strategies, by providing a revolutionary approach for professional financial advisors to offer their clients sophisticated, customizable portfolios, along with enhanced trading and rebalancing capabilities. Unlike traditional “robo” investing platforms that only provide passive options, InvestmentPOD’s sophisticated investing algorithms provide multi-strategy and asset diversification, all while lowering trading costs.Previously, this type of sophisticated approach was only available through a portfolio of hedge funds; however, hedge funds have shown to be an expensive and inefficient way to achieve these investing goals. Now, through the vast liquidity and global availability of ETFs, combined with InvestmentPOD’s advanced and sophisticated algorithms, advisors can enjoy the benefits of diversification, automation and lowered costs to take their firms to the next level.
What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
Wealth management as an industry is woefully behind in technology adoption. As a highly regulated and conservative space, wealth management has evolved over time to include many manual and inefficient processes, which are still in wide usage across the industry today. However, with today’s new innovations, there is a great opportunity for new investment automation platforms such as InvestmentPOD to become an industry standard.
We are already seeing how other consumer innovations, such as “robo” technology, can have a big impact on bringing needed efficiencies to streamline the client experience.Accordingly, bringing these fintech capabilities to the professional advisor industry that represents over $5 trillion in assets has the potential to become a vast fintech opportunity.
What do you believe the next major innovation in financial technology will be & why?
There have been many predictions and projections for the growth of fintech, however, some of the key megatrends for where it is all going can be found in the work of Professor Andy Lo of MIT. In his recent book, he points out that there will be a focus on “dynamic indexes” for investing which will be an improved way to invest over purely passive indexes in that they will be 100% transparent and quantitative in nature, a key element of what we are embedding into InvestmentPOD.
Additionally, the future will be all about customization and personalization rather than just a generic approach that many digital platforms are offering today. We refer to them as “personal power portfolios” that will enable advisors to truly tailor each client portfolio to their client’s specific needs, rather than just offer them a handful of model portfolios that are generic in nature. Without this technology innovation, advisors simply do not have the time or capacity to get to this granular level across a large client base.
The good news is that we believe InvestmentPOD can be the platform to bring this level of customization, personalization and advisor-augmentation so that both clients and advisors are better served.
-------------------
Jacqueline Ko Matthew is the CEO and founder of InvestmentPOD. Prior to founding InvestmentPOD, Matthews was an investment banker and wealth manager with Goldman Sachs.