Reflecting on 2024, what were your bank’s(wealth manager’s) major milestones from an operational perspective and how did you achieve them? Conversely, what were the setbacks and challenges encountered along the way, and what measures were taken to surmount them?

Last year in many ways was an introduction to industrial-grade operational excellence at Raffles Family Office (RFO).

Since the firm was founded in 2015, it has been laser-focused on being efficient, looking for creative ways to enable exponential business growth, while limiting expenses. By all measures, RFO has been operating extremely effectively.

However, with our first decade almost behind us, and as we look ahead, we recognise that sustaining our success requires more than just maintaining what works. It requires a complete re-imagination of what our whole front-to-back operational infrastructure should look like. This has kicked off a holistic strategic review, setting the stage for our most ambitious transformational journey yet.

In terms of major milestones, obtaining buy-in across the whole firm was necessary for this transformation.

How did your bank/wealth manager leverage and adopt technology regionally in 2024, and what is planned for 2025? What are the key metrics employed to assess technological investments and which specific investments have had the most significant impact on revenue generation and overall client experience?

As one of Asia’s most prominent multi-family offices, our technology stack was already quite mature by industry standards: We have an AI-enabled proprietary app, a world-class CRM and a digital workflow for client account opening.

In 2025, we will be kickstarting an 18 to 24-month transformation to implement a fully integrated, front-to-back technology infrastructure to digitalise our entire client experience – from the moment a prospective client makes contact with us, to becoming a qualified lead, to onboarding, to doing business with us – all the way through to service and detailed reporting thereafter.

From a relationship manager’s perspective, they will have a simplified desktop and mobile experience that will make it easy to look after their clients, pulling relevant information and data together so that they can have a 360-degree view.

Success will be centred around a user experience that is truly client-first, and delivering more operational efficiencies so that all of our associates can focus on adding value. It is all about return on investment, measured against specific hurdle rates and improving our firm’s operating leverage.

Given the increasing sophistication of digital channels and other client-facing innovations, how do you maintain an equilibrium between high-touch client services and cutting edge technologies?

As a multi-family office that specialises in advising UHNW families, we understand that our clients’ needs are extremely complex, multi-generational and multi-jurisdictional. We understand that technology and personal advice are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they are highly complementary. So all of our digital channels are designed to enhance or enable much better personalised advice across the wide array of topics that our clients require advice on.

As a result of evolving regulatory requirements, private banks/wealth managers are reviewing their compliance systems and processes. What are the current operational challenges posed by the regulations in the jurisdictions in which you operate, and what can be done to effectively address and overcome these challenges?

The key point for us is to ensure that we have all our client, transactional and positional data properly structured, organised and stored. Part of our transformation is to re-design our entire data lifecycle so that all information is easily accessible, traceable, and secure. This way, we can quickly respond to any regulatory inquiry, manage risks and make insightful, data-driven decisions.

Operational resilience is at the top of private bank/wealth manager’s minds and cyber resilience has also moved up the agenda in recent years. How does your firm effectively manage third-party dependencies and enhance the operational resilience against the failure of third-party IT solutions?

We use a very robust risk management framework, where we constantly monitor our own operational resilience through regular business continuity tests and simulated cyber-attacks. We also take the same approach when we work closely with our third party suppliers to ensure they are doing the same.

Virtual assets (VA) have increasingly gained attention among some wealthy individuals and families. How prepared is your firm to capture potential opportunities in this space in terms of necessary infrastructures to support VA-related transactions? And do you have any plan to enhance your VA-related service in 2025?

We are very prepared and have been a pioneer in this space for quite some time. Our subsidiary Revo Digital Family Office is providing clients with active advice and management of various virtual asset solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has both promises and challenges for the wealth management industry. What are some of the AI use cases in your firm over the past year? How has AI been helping the firm to improve operational efficiency? What are some of the pain points wealth managers need to overcome in AI implementation? What’s your plan for AI adaptations in 2025?

As mentioned earlier, we have already deployed AI in our own proprietary app in the form of a chatbot. In 2025, we will implement this even more broadly to assist with research, data aggregation, supplementing code development and providing meaningful insights to our clients and to our own staff.

With more discussions surrounding data utilisation, banks/wealth managers have developed a profound appreciation for the worth of the data they possess. How do you identify, correct, and maintain data within the firm, and how are you leveraging data to enhance revenues and simultaneously enhance the quality of customer services and offerings?

We are in the early days in our transformation. However, we have already identified a number of different ways to reorganise our data – from clients’ static data, to securities data, to transactional and positional data. We have clearly documented the lineage of each data element, so we do not need to worry about different values existing in different places.

As of today, we can leverage our data to understand client preferences to inform how we design new products and solutions. We can also monitor the health of our firm through business intelligence visualisation tools and manage our risks at the same time.

Technology companies eyeing the financial services sector have the potential to disrupt the industry. Are tech and fintech companies potential competitors or partners? How are partnerships between wealth managers and tech companies reshaping the industry?

We see competition coming from all different directions. Technology has broken down many barriers to entry and with a captive audience and a large user-base. Take Starbucks, for example. It can offer financial services to its customers since it is holding well over US$1 billion on Starbucks cards around the world. What is to stop them from extending credit on those balances?

Financial services, anchored through personalised advice, is one end of the spectrum. Fully automated, digital solutions, could be the other end. However, success is how well companies can embrace both and essentially get to the middle as quickly as possible. As mentioned earlier, these are not mutually exclusive pursuits.

What is the sweet spot for your firm’s cost-to-income ratio in the region, and how are wealth managers tackling the cost side of the equation in Asia, whether relating to investments, real estate, or other operating costs?

Cost management is absolutely a key element of our success. Whether it is optimising our operating leverage, improving our unit costs per activity, or making capital expenditures using a very disciplined approach, we keep cost management front and centre in how we run our business.