Wealthman is a fintech company based in London, focused on building innovative solutions for wealth managers and crypto investors. Their sophisticated stack of protocols empowers asset managers with tools for building, execution and delivery of their services, including:
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– gaining access to market data and statistics;
– provision of robo-advisory and asset allocation algorithms;
– trading digital assets on the blockchain;
– risk reduction due to use of smart contracts;
– managing client portfolios.
The strength of the Wealthman project lies in the experienced and agile team. With the mother company’s AUM of around $100 million and 10+ years expertise in portfolio management, the founders created Wealthman to meet the needs of the company’s clients.
Today we are glad to present to you the co-founder and CFO of Wealthman, Olga Pershina.
Olga has been working in investment banking for over 10 years. We asked her a few questions about Wealthman and her role in the project.
Hi Olga. First, let’s start with the basics. What is your role at Wealthman Ltd?
I was there at the start of the project, being its co-founder. Now I am responsible for the financial planning and internal control.
I am also involved in IR, so I attend various fintech and banking conferences where I meet with investment funds and various partners to present our project and as a result establish arrangements for cooperation and investment. Recently, I have been presenting our idea in the UK, Russia, Armenia, Emirates, Switzerland, etc. and also keep an eye on the USA.
What do you think qualifies you to take on such a project? Do you have experience in similar ventures?
Well, I am quite an experienced entrepreneur. First of all, the international group of companies Mera Capital was established by Andrey Huseu and me. We have offices in Russia, Latvia and the USA and successfully manage around $100 million AUM within our wealth management division. The second equivalent part of our business is the provision of services in the field of corporate finance. We conduct IPOs, ICOs, M&A, Private Equity deals, etc. Hence, ICO technology is not new for us. Besides that, during my career I have launched operating processes for professional financial market participants under the license of the Central Bank of Russia. My relevant professional experience for running all these ventures was obtained through working in the industrial, IT and investment banking sectors.
Many in our community are asking how you came up with the idea of Wealthman. Can you tell us more about it?
The idea of the project came from market demand. As you already know, we provide wealth management services. So, with the growth of crypto assets on the market, some of our clients expressed interest in advice in this field – they wanted to make digital assets part of their investment portfolios. We rapidly grew our competence in this field. The problem was how to expand our value proposition and serve clients in a convenient and secure way. We needed a smart tool and decided to develop our own decentralised platform where we can solve more wealth management issues and enable clients to trust smart contracts instead of a brand.
There is no solution like Wealthman on the market, and there are huge potential gains if you create something that asset managers and investors could use successfully.
So it is useful for us, profitable, allows us to serve more clients with asset volume lower than HNWI level, we have no direct competitors yet, and it does not enter into competition with other platforms and investment bankers – more than that: it allows them to find customers. Why wouldn’t we start developing such a solution immediately?!
The next question is about blockchain technology: why is it important to use in wealth management?
Well, there are multiple different reasons. The most important is probably the issue of trustlessness. We talk about it a lot in our articles.
Right now, most of the legal transactions in the world have to be approved by trusted third parties like a bank or a broker. This speeds up the processing but invites errors or fraud.
Frankly, some investors don’t trust banks and other parties anymore. On the other hand, investment companies have come up with many solutions to shift towards more controlled and transparent asset management, for example via robo-advisory* and more automated solutions.
*A robo-advisory solution is an automated, algorithm-driven wealth management service with little or no human supervision. At the start of the process, a robo-advisor typically collects information about client’s goals, risk appetite and financial aspirations via an online survey. Then, the robo-advisor engages in an ongoing process of rebalancing the investment portfolio based on market data to keep it in line with the client’s goals.
You mentioned that blockchain solves multiple issues. What else will you use blockchain tech for?
Trustlessness covers the general class of issues that can be solved with the help of blockchain. In particular, this relates to the tasks of calculation and process administration that occur in second level networks (off chain networks). There are also relevant tasks in asset register maintenance, voting, conducting deals on conditional transfer of assets, etc.
Thank you Olga for your answers.
It was my pleasure.
To find out more about Wealthman you can visit out site (link) or follow us on social media. You can also submit more questions for our team here.
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