Name:
Title: CEO
Company: Private Wealth Systems
Web Address: https://privatewealthsystems.com
How did you personally become involved in fintech?
My personal involvement with fintech started as a teenager and a son of a third-generation beneficiary of an ultra high net worth family. My father didn’t have centralised oversight over his advisors or his wealth. He had no way of understanding or managing the collective risks he was assuming in the investment choices that his multiple investment managers were taking on his behalf. That lack of oversight ultimately led to the destruction of our family’s wealth, and with it the legacy and unity of our family. Private Wealth Systems was founded to eliminate the friction of information by solving the structural challenges around data, scale, and security for the ultra high net community and to ensure what happened to my family won’t happen to other families regardless of financial complexity or global jurisdiction.
What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
Private Wealth Systems is the plumbing that is powering the future of private finance. We are different because we are the only system that was built from scratch based on lessons learned working with over 1,000 family offices and 10 private banks across 4 continents over 20 years. We built an aggregation engine that captures 3x-times more transaction level data than other aggregators. We built a transaction processing engine that has proven to support 8.3x-times more data per operations analyst which allows for hyper-efficient scale. We built a system that has eliminated the rigid data hierarchy that plagues other systems which allows users to literally group, structure, and classify their data any way they want. Our system has withstood a 4-month long client-paid transaction level audit by KPMG which proved our system is simply unmatched in terms of scale, scope, and data accuracy. We are now leveraging our revolutionary platform to offer the world’s first and only digital financial platform for the ultra high net worth community to support the foundation of every financial transaction and answer any financial question which in turn allows for the paradigm of power to shift from the centralized financial intermediaries back to the hands of the individual wealth owner. This in turn will reshape the entire private finance industry as we know it.
What are the biggest problems facing the fintech industry in the future?
A 25-year-old with $10,000 in savings has a multitude of fintech tools and platforms at his or her disposal to track every penny spent and every dollar invested. Sadly, if that same 25 year old had several million or several billion there isn’t a single platform that can provide meaningful and trusted intelligence to ensure that wealth owner has active oversight over their managers and mandates, until now.
According to Wealth-X there are over 291,000 individuals who have $30 million or more in personal wealth controlling over $36 trillion in global investment power. There is an additional 24.8 million individuals who have over $1 million in wealth controlling over $68.2 trillion in private wealth. This means there is nearly $100 trillion that is being managed without centralized oversight or control. Between 2008 and 2010 we all experienced the impact of having information that was not accurate and not actionable, with over $33 trillion in global wealth destroyed. This is the best way to quantify the problem and impact of not having information that is tax-level accurate, timely enough to be relevant and actionable, and comprehensive enough to support even the most complex investments and balance sheets.
The private wealth segment is the most concentrated and most powerful consumer segment on the planet, yet it remains unserved and reactive waiting for their quarterly reports from their multiple managers to tell them what happened to their wealth in the prior quarter.
The reason this market segment has not participated or benefited from the fintech revolution is because the inherent complexity of extreme wealth creates organic barriers to entry that prevents financial applications from adequately supporting this market.
There are numerous examples of fintech companies that had great intentions of serving ultra-high net worth families, but after burning through tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars in capital they understood that in the ultra-high net worth segment it is experience and knowledge, not capital, that determines longevity and success.