The latest developments, such as product and service launches, upgrades and changes, to the digital technology used by wealth managers.

Backbase
Digital banking firm Backbase has launched an “onboarding and origination solution” for clients, including wealth managers.

Backbase says that its turn-key solution allows firms to acquire clients – or “onboard” them – more efficiently and speed up a process that can often take an hour and is frequently a laborious, exhausting and irritating experience. This publication has heard that some private banks take an average of two months to take a client on. 

Backbase said some traditional banks’ onboarding, if done at a physical branch, can take as long as 90 days, costing tens of thousands of dollars or equivalent currency values in lost revenues. The business said it can slash onboarding times by as much as 80 per cent, cut operational costs by more than 30 per cent and get products to market up to 18 times faster.

“We have been piloting this next-generation solution over the past 12 months with various customers around the world. We are extremely pleased with the results. It's incredibly fast to implement, extremely versatile in the way it integrates and complements existing systems, and it brings a very sound ROI for our customers,” Jouk Pleiter, chief executive of Backbase, said. 

Banks and other financial institutions which use Backbase’s Digital-first Banking Platform include ABN AMRO, AIB, Barclays, Banamex, Bank United, BNP Paribas, Central1, Citi bank, Citizens bank, CheBanca!, HDFC, Hiscox, IDFC First, KeyBank, Lloyds Banking Group, Metrobank, Navy Federal Credit Union, PostFinance, RBC, Societe Generale and Westpac.

Maxonrow
Maxonrow, a firm using blockchain distributed ledger technology, has said that it has added a new feature to its MAX-Wallet offering which cuts costs and errors to help people meeting KYC and anti-money laundering controls.  

The new feature is called MAX-Register, a sign-up login solution that gets rid of the tedious repeating logins and registrations on different platforms that people often contend with.

At the moment, users can test MAX-Register, which is already implemented with its first partner, GRXTrade. 

"We are excited about this partnership. GRXTrade prides itself on prioritizing security and user experience. MAX-Wallet is the perfect login solution for us since it has KYC mechanisms embedded in the app,” Ryan Fellal, GRXTrade’s chief executive, said. “You have to go through the identity verification procedure to get your wallet address, which has a rigorous screening process supported by a diligent support team. Having their team handle the customer KYC and the login process saves us so much time and money. We can focus on launching our digital asset trading platform, which we worked very hard for and are very excited to share with our users,” he said. 

MAX-Register works by encrypting the user's KYC data. When there is a request from the merchant, MAX-Register will send the encrypted data to the user's wallet to decrypt (with the user's permission) before reaching the merchant. MAX-Register only has access to the user's encrypted data which can be decrypted with the user's private key.