This is a sponsored advertorial from ICE.

The electronification of trading and digitisation of the back office have revolutionised every corner of financial services since the turn of the century. While the benefits have long been recognised from dealer trading desks in Hong Kong to buy-side firms in Singapore, today, nowhere are the fruits of cutting-edge financial technology being enjoyed more than in the once-staid world of wealth management.

APAC wealth managers are embracing new financial technologies with a degree of enthusiasm comparable to how alternatives managers were swept along by the advent of algorithmic and high-frequency trading in the 2000s. The evidence of this shift is readily apparent in surveys of wealth advisors in the region:

76% of APAC wealth management c-suite executives identified gen AI as a highly disruptive technology for the coming decade, with digital currencies cited as the most disruptive by 24% of respondents.¹

60% of APAC wealth advisors are already using alternative investment products, with a further 27% interested in learning about how they can use them for clients.²

The APAC wealth-tech industry — with AUM of $600-$700 billion at the end of 2022 — is anticipated to grow by approximately 25-30% per year and could quadruple by 2027.³

ICE Wealth Management spent 2025 meeting with wealth advisors around the world and throughout APAC to hear about the tech functionality they find most useful for managing portfolios. In this article, we share on-the-ground feedback from advisors about the three technology enhancements they’re finding most transformative in servicing APAC clients in the future.

Corporate actions data

One of the data elements that most bedevils wealth managers is the sheer number of corporate actions that need to be reflected and updated in client portfolios.

From quarterly dividends and special dividends, stock splits and reverse splits, to rights issues, award exchanges, and M&A activity, accurately capturing and implementing client instructions for different types of corporate actions each month poses a serious operational challenge for wealth advisors.

The scale of the monitoring challenge is not widely appreciated: the ICE database tracks corporate actions for approximately 80,000 companies operating in more than 100 countries around the world.

Even for the largest and best-resourced wealth management firms, the universe of applicable actions that need to be captured can be difficult to comprehend. This is just as true for family offices investing personal wealth as it is for alternatives managers pursuing strategies built around trading models that rely on precise regression analysis of historical market data.

Corporate action discovery is just one element of the challenge, however. The data itself must be delivered in a format that enables seamless integration into wealth management systems and applications in an entirely automated fashion (such as XML or the ISO 15022 standard).

APAC wealth managers are increasingly seeking web-based and API solutions to provide timely notification of corporate actions, not least those that necessitate the selection of an elective action on behalf of clients.

The ability to automate the resultant elements of corporate actions – from harvesting tax losses to selectively realising capital gains in the execution of a tax-advantaged strategy – is all contingent on the timeliness and accuracy of data and is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor for wealth managers.

Continuous evaluated pricing

APAC HNWIs — and ultra-HNWIs in particular — have grown increasingly demanding of their wealth advisor in the information age. Long gone are the days of a weekly check-in to update them on their performance or provide a temperature check of the market. And the concept of a monthly, or even quarterly portfolio statement, seems positively antiquated.

Accustomed to logging into an electronic portal for live updates on stocks and exchange-traded funds, clients paying to have their wealth professionally managed now expect immediate answers on where the market is trading and real-time visibility into where all of their holdings are marked, including illiquid assets.

Since fixed income instruments like bonds and asset-backed securities are not marked-to-market, providing clients with a current valuation requires wealth managers to have access to technology that can provide continuous evaluated pricing (CEP).

CEP tools work using a combination of human pricing expertise and automated valuation inputs. Explained simply, human evaluators map out the characteristics of the securities and data sources in a given market sector. Automation tools are then applied to continuously evaluate price changes as market data is processed. If outliers are detected in the data, human evaluators review the exceptions and apply their market knowledge, industry contacts, and other expertise to resolve them.

Through this process of using continuously updated evaluations for fixed income securities, CEP allows wealth managers to calculate the net asset value of a client’s portfolio at any time during the trading day, not only providing clients with an up-to-the-minute view of their holdings but facilitating the potential monetisation of less-liquid parts of their portfolio at prices close to where the market is currently trading.

In addition to providing enhanced transparency to clients and price discovery for the front office, CEP also provides benefits for wealth management middle and back offices. These include supporting position monitoring, best execution analysis, compliance and transaction cost analysis, as well as real-time risk and credit utilisation monitoring.

The benefits that CEP can provide in portfolio transparency for clients and analytical enhancements for operations teams are making access to such capabilities an absolute necessity for wealth advisors.

Ability to validate transactions

For the wealth management middle office, greater efficiency in the business of trade validation remains a technological priority. While the front office interfaces with clients and executes trades on their behalf, responsibility lies with middle-office operations teams to reconcile transactions to ensure that all details align.

Verifying trade details requires access to a wide swathe of third-party market and reference data, which sometimes must be cross-referenced with information sourced from custodians, executing brokers and other external parties. This means operations teams need a market data terminal.

Since such terminals are usually subject to hefty subscriptions – often equivalent to many thousands of US dollars a month – the middle office routinely finds itself working with a single shared terminal. Operations team members are often forced to wait their turn to access the machine, creating recurring and cascading delays in the essential process of validating trades and introducing operational and other risks.

Recent years have seen a wider range of market data providers active in global capital markets, providing greater consumer choice and price competitiveness. Wealth advisors today enjoy greater access to market and reference data at a lower price point. Better pricing is enabling middle and back-office teams to obtain additional data terminals, making trade validation more efficient and potentially lowering risk for both wealth managers and their clients.

Simultaneously with the greater availability of market data terminals, the sophistication and number of the functions that can be undertaken on these interfaces is also advancing.

While some terminals currently only facilitate the input of one identifier at a time – making it extremely time-consuming to work through dozens of identifiers to validate trade exceptions – the ICE Connect terminal allows the uploading of multiple identifiers simultaneously. A single screen displaying evaluated automated pricing and reference data saves users potentially hours of work as part of their day-to-day responsibilities. ICE Connect, the market data platform from ICE, offers users an integrated web interface for cost-effective access to multi-asset data, advanced analytics, and the latest news.

The combination of access to multiple market data terminals, continuous evaluated pricing and a comprehensive corporate actions database, empowers APAC wealth managers to accomplish more for clients, with greater efficiency, and at significantly less expense.

Explore ICE’s data and tools for wealth managers and private banks.

 

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¹ Accenture, The Future of Asia Wealth Management 2024, page 28
² 2025 EY Global Wealth Research Report, page 50
³ McKinsey & Company, WealthTech in Asia-Pacific, page 11

This is a sponsored advertorial from ICE.