02 JULI 2024
"Digitalisation of retail has been a strategic goal for several years"
Assetmax was acquired at the end of 2022 by Infront, the European wealth tech company with almost 500 employees and offices in the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Italy. Massimo Ferrari explains what has happened since then and what role cloud capability plays.
How has your former company developed since the takeover by Infront?
Infront, founded in Norway in the 2000s, serves thousands of financial professionals with technology for trading and connectivity, data feeds, financial analyses, as well as services in risk and valuation, portfolio management and advisory. The aim of the acquisition was to consolidate Assetmax in Switzerland and expand Assetmax technology in Europe. Infront is investing in improving the functionality and Europeanisation of the product, in particular by adding and optimising regulation-related functions and adapting to the specific local requirements of the various markets.
At Group level, Infront is investing in the cloudialisation of its technology services, a process that also affects Assetmax. A specialised team is working on integrating Assetmax into Amazon Web Services to optimise scalability, flexibility, security and cost efficiency. This transformation is not only important from a technology perspective, but also from a regulatory perspective such as data protection and workflow flexibility, as well as from a cyber security perspective. In view of rising standards in these areas, we are convinced that only large infrastructure providers such as Amazon will be able to fulfil these requirements in the future.
The year 2023 was characterised by the integration of Assetmax into the Infront structure. How did the integration go?
2023 was a record year for Assetmax and this gives us a lot of confidence in the quality of our efforts and a clear direction on how to tackle the challenges ahead. As with any integration process, this one was fraught with challenges that affected both Assetmax and Infront. Infront was committed to maintaining Assetmax's first-class service, Swissness and philosophy. The professionalisation of Assetmax's internal business processes, which were still reminiscent of a start-up structure, led to various operational and organisational changes. The exchange of culture and experience with Group companies in other countries that have been active in the wealth tech market for much longer than Assetmax has led to significant enrichment.
How will the product develop?
In addition to the aforementioned Europeanisation, we are investing in the integration of Infront's key services into the Assetmax product offering. We are currently rolling out a competitive and comprehensive financial data feed service for asset management that all Assetmax clients can use. The service also includes ESG data from Clarity AI and our Investment Manager financial terminal with intraday data. We also have the integration of trading services in the pipeline. A pilot project with Zürcher Kantonalbank and the Winterthur Consulting Group for the use of the "Order Placement API" in the OpenWealth Standard has also been successfully finalised. The trading interface is a cost-effective and efficient alternative to the FIX protocol, which can be used to enter stock market orders in a non-bank portfolio management system.
What effect will this have?
The digitalisation of trading has been a strategic goal of Swiss custodian banks for several years now and represents a major step forward in the day-to-day business of asset managers. In Switzerland, we are still in the early stages of introducing this technology for asset management, but a look at other financial sectors and other countries clearly shows that trading will encompass all asset classes in a few years' time and will become increasingly immediate and therefore more technologically sophisticated and complex to manage.
Infront has trading technology in the European market that has been developed over several decades and I am delighted that Assetmax clients will be able to benefit from this. In addition, the integration of valuation and risk calculation services (including scenario simulation and risk budgeting) will give Assetmax clients access to the most advanced mathematical models currently used by major European financial institutions, including Switzerland.
Massimo Ferrari
Infront/Assetmax
Short biography: Massimo Ferrari studied engineering at the ETH in Zurich and was involved in the development of the Finfox advisory platform. After completing his MBA at INSEAD, he managed institutional portfolios at Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) before founding Assetmax, which was acquired by Infront in 2022. He currently heads the Wealth Product Management team at Infront.
Massimo Ferrari is a CFA charterholder
