Credit Suisse Private Banking has gone live with Canopy, its automated account aggregation and reporting solution in Singapore, six months after inking a partnership with the Singaporean fintech startup.
Benjamin Cavalli, Credit Suisse’s Singapore CEO, head of private banking Southeast Asia and head of Singapore location private banking division, tells Asian Private Banker that prior to the launch, the platform’s pilot testing phase yielded interesting findings.
Asian Private Banker (APB): During the pilot phase, who trialled the platform?
Benjamin Cavalli (BC): For the last six months, Credit Suisse has been pilot testing [Canopy] with a large number of clients in Singapore, including family offices and UHNWIs.
APB: What response did you get from clients?
BC: Positive. Based on the feedback we received from our clients, we’ve had a very sizeable number of logins and statements uploaded by our clients which is evidence that the clients have been actively using Canopy.
APB: Was Canopy used differently by UHNW and family office clients?
BC: The tool [was] particularly relevant to family offices as they find aggregation and pooling data very useful for reporting and accounting purposes. Canopy also goes beyond traditional bankable assets as it can aggregate non-listed alternative investments including private equity and non-bankable assets of any sorts such as real estate holdings. In terms of asset allocation, currency allocation and country, as well as industry exposure, can also be extracted from it.
APB: Canopy has a function whereby clients can choose to give their RMs a view of their consolidated portfolios. How popular was this option among your clients during the pilot phase?
BC: While the function that enables RMs to have a holistic view of a client’s entire portfolio across their various wealth managers and other custodians was not switched on during the pilot phase, we received requests from some clients who are keen to have that feature available.
APB: Were clients concerned about data security when using Canopy?
BC: Clients will contract directly with Canopy for the aggregation service so that their data can be held by Canopy as an independent party. We have broadened our digital private banking offering so that clients are able to access and view their Canopy aggregation and analytics through our digital private banking platform.
APB: Were there any interesting findings from the pilot testing stage?
BC: During the pilot phase, we received enquiries from interested prospects who have opened accounts with Credit Suisse [and were interested in] gaining access to Canopy.
APB: Previously, how did Credit Suisse aggregate accounts for clients?
BC: Before Canopy, we offered this service manually for certain UHNW clients who have been very transparent with us about adopting an asset allocation approach across all their various bank providers. Many of the UHNW clients have asked us to keep an eye on their holdings beyond Credit Suisse. It has never been as sophisticated or real-time as Canopy.
APB: How will Canopy benefit Credit Suisse’s private banking clients?
BC: Given that we are in a service and advisory business and are dealing with building long-standing trusted relationships with clients, we believe that rolling out a solution like Canopy will help strengthen our client value proposition. Clients will benefit from seeing their aggregated portfolio and analytics on their consolidated wealth position, allowing them to make informed decisions on their investment strategies and refine future investment decisions.
APB: How will you gauge the success of this initiative?
BC: When it comes to measuring the success of the investment, we believe that we should be willing to disrupt our own business in order to serve our clients better. As with many of the innovative digital services we have pioneered, we feel that if we understand our clients and their needs well and innovate to respond to these needs, then the rewards will follow. We aspire to be the private bank of choice for our clients.
APB: What is the biggest challenge you foresee with the rollout process?
BC: No different to the rollout of our digital private banking platform, one potential challenge that we also see as an opportunity is that with Canopy live, our clients have the ability to read across their portfolios with different wealth managers, allowing clients to have transparency of their full portfolio performance. Clients are also able to view their Credit Suisse portfolio performance 24/7. All these will raise the bar for us to deliver value-added services to our clients in a more agile way, and we believe that this will help build stronger trust-based relationships with them.
