UBS International Wealth Administration has gone stay with a digital platform for structured merchandise in Singapore and Hong Kong, offering clients within the two places with entry to a wide array of merchandise, the flexibility to customise these merchandise, and the flexibility to commerce them on the undergo UBS’s on-line banking platforms.

The product, known as UBS Structured Merchandise Digital, permits purchasers to personalize and transact common structured merchandise by way of UBS E-Banking and UBS Cell Banking. By the platform, customers can entry funding merchandise linked to 1,500 underliers throughout main fairness markets, exchanges and sectors, create baskets of equities, customise these merchandise and decide their parameters, set the tenors they deem probably the most acceptable, and make sure trades inside minutes.

UBS Structured Merchandise Digital platform, Supply: UBS

Structured merchandise are monetary devices that mix varied conventional monetary property like shares, bonds, choices, and derivatives right into a single funding product. These merchandise are sometimes designed to satisfy particular funding goals and threat tolerance of traders. They’re additionally extremely customizable and will be tailor-made to offer traders with publicity to a diversified portfolio of property by way of only one funding.

Nicola Pantone, UBS’s co-head of unified world markets for Asia-Pacific (APAC) informed Citywire Asia that the UBS Structured Merchandise Digital platform goals to deal with the rise in demand for these funding merchandise. The financial institution stated that at launch, the platform will give attention to offering entry to equity-linked notes (ELNs) and reverse convertible notes (RCNs), however it would ultimately develop its checklist of structured merchandise obtainable in a while.

UBS Structured Merchandise Digital is a part of the financial institution’s digital wealth and buying and selling providing, which already gives purchasers with UBS My Method, a hybrid digital wealth administration platform; We.UBS, a digital-led platform providing wealth administration providers to prosperous purchasers in China; and UBS Neo, a multi-asset buying and selling platform that’s utilized by greater than 1.8 million UBS clients.

An increasing wealthtech sector

The enlargement of UBS’s digital wealth proposition comes at a time when tech startups are creating superior wealth administration platforms and intuitive advisory options to faucet Asia’s middle-class inhabitants. A few of these startups have gained appreciable traction and are actually increasing past their borders.

Endowus, an impartial digital wealth startup from Singapore, claims it witnessed a income development of 80% in 2022 and says it now serves over 100 thousand purchasers with content material, recommendation and entry, managing greater than US$5 billion price of property.

The startup, which was based in 2017, operates in Singapore and Hong Kong, offering a wealth platform that spans each non-public wealth and public pension financial savings.

Syfe, one other Singaporean wealthtech startup, claims greater than 100,000 clients in its dwelling nation. Launched in 2019, the corporate affords a holistic vary of options throughout each managed portfolios and brokerage providers to retail purchasers, and lately expanded to Hong Kong.

Asia’s wealthtech startups are rising on the again of elevated adoption of digital monetary options. A 2022 examine commissioned by insurer Prudential Singapore polled 800 Singapore residents aged 25 to 65 and discovered that greater than 4 in 5 (85%) respondents are expert at utilizing cellular banking apps, whereas 70% are expert in monetary administration apps.

Individually, a 2022 Endowus examine, which surveyed 680 Singapore respondents, revealed that digital funding platforms are rising in reputation, with 90% of respondents indicating utilizing digital wealth platforms and robo-advisors.

Asia’s booming asset and wealth administration trade

APAC has been witnessing robust financial development, owing to the area’s regulatory panorama, well-developed infrastructure and open enterprise setting. This has led to an increase within the inhabitants of high-net-worth people (HNWIs), which now totals about 15 million folks, knowledge from KPMG present. The determine makes APAC the house of the second-largest focus of HNWIs on the planet after North America.

PwC expects APAC’s property below administration (AUM) to develop quicker than every other regional globally, rising from US$15.1 trillion in 2017 to US$29.6 trillion in 2025.

Complete shopper property throughout APAC in US$ trillion, Supply: Asset and Wealth Administration 2025: The Asian Awakening, PwC 2019

McKinsey initiatives that the prosperous and mass-affluent segments in Asia, notably these in creating economies, will drive most of this development. The wealth pool of this group, which includes households with investable property of US$100,000 to US$1 million, is projected to hit US$4.7 trillion by 2026, up from US$2.7 trillion in 2021 as Asians’ incomes rise.

For banks and wealth managers, McKinsey estimates the potential incremental income from serving these purchasers to be standing between US$20 billion to US$25 billion, contributing greater than half of the trade’s income development in Asia over the subsequent three years.

Wealth swimming pools in Asian market segments, primarily based on family monetary wealth, Supply: McKinsey and Firm, Feb 2023