Luca Merolla


By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ Insart

We continue our series of interviews with industry leaders with a quick talk with Luca Merolla—startup advisor and CEO of Guruvest, an open investment platform. We discussed the biggest trends in trading strategies and robo-advisor technology.

Luca Merolla

CEO at Guruvest

Luca can rightfully be called a pioneer of FinTech because he was working in this field before the term actually emerged. Combining a strong background in computer science with studies in management and private equity, he has been in charge of software development in several companies in the financial sector.

Before establishing his own company, Luca had a position in Swissquote Bank, which was one of the early adopters of robo-advisor technology. There, his work in senior management gave him vast exposure on various financial technologies, including: robo-advisory, automated trading strategies, risk management, and Forex. Leveraging this experience, he started his own broker-independent investment-management company—Guruvest.

In our conversation, we discussed the many problems of outsourcing trading strategies and investment decision, and we also discussed the robo-advisory company of the future.

The conflict between asset allocation and investment decisions

While discussing his path to wealth management, Luca highlights a crucial industry raw spot—the conflicts of interest between asset allocation and investment decisions. That is also one of the reasons why he decided to make Guruvest independent of brokers:

“Many financial institutions that are brokers […] are investing [clients’ money], not theirs. Even if the trading strategies are often developed in-house, however, they are not designed around the client and, as a result, the portfolios they can offer is quite limited.”

Following the line of asset custody, Luca insists it is best to decouple banks from the investment process and let them grow apart from each other, thus enabling more options for customers. Nevertheless, these two parts of one chain should be easily interoperable:

“There won’t be any conflicts of interest and this will allow us to connect more financial institutions and propose customized trading strategies or investment strategies for every person.”

The problems of chasing robo-advisory solutions

Luca knows all the angles of robo-advisory systems. He points out the huge customer-acquisition costs as the first and the biggest problem in such businesses:

“Just imagine that you have to open another bank account to access a robo-advisor solution. No matter how simple the procedure, [there] is still a need to transfer the money in[to] this account.”

This also aggravates the restrictions imposed by national laws and regulations. Banks that are going to use robo-advisors have to put up with the fact that their operation will be limited to the country in which they are regulated. To expand internationally, they should either acquire a licensed broker or bank in the target country or obtain a new license and grow their brand there organically. After studying the issue, Luca says, both variants turned out not to be good from the return on investment point of view. On the flip side, Guruvest claims to avoid these obstacles by being broker-independent, asset-free, and not subject to the same licensing and low-rate restrictions that other banks or brokers have:

“We have the luxury that the clients does not have to deposit money through us. So the clients can keep their money in their favorite banks, brokers, [and] crypto exchanges, and we send them trading instructions and orders directly into their accounts.”

Introducing artificial intelligence and blockchain to trading strategies

Being an investment-management company, Guruvest provides a local advisor service that allows to execute and mirror orders just like in social trading platforms. The technology enables the strategy of a professional trader to be mirrored; however, it is still the client who is responsible for copying one trade instead of another. In turn, Guruvest sees the value in using corrective intelligence to protect their clients. Their AI algorithm will be able to learn how to react in certain situations; for example, in case the trading strategy has major changes. Luca claims that AI can be used to analyze the strategies, which the platform stores, and can help to build better portfolios based on the acquired insights:

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