. The reason for coding mostly in Java has to do with API integrations being easier with third-party custodians. Those third-party APIs are also more solid in Java.
“We have weekly meetings with every one of our clients, either the CEO or the chief investment officer who are our points of contact. We have shared online work boards which lists all the issues, and client requests. We use these boards to share development progresses made over time, as I go through and implement functions. We prioritize development based on usability across clients and complexity of the function creation.”
To follow or to challenge trends
Mobile is ingrained in everything. People spend a good portion of their lives on phones. From a tech point of view, Emotomy is optimized and was recently redesigned so that clients can do everything from building strategies to opening accounts and answering questionnaires. Patrick says the platform is ready for smartphones, iPads and laptops.
The market environment is a main driver of change. A tech company can build as many systems and tools as they want, but if it isn’t useful for clients, there is going to be a lot of pressure on fees, which in turn impacts revenues and, subsequently, tech budgets for firms:
“I think digitalization of the wealth-management business is essential. If you don’t have a digital, easy-to-use system for your clients, in five years you won’t be in business—that’s my thought.”
Emotomy is geared to visualize investment data back to 1993, so their predictive algorithms and tools are based on several market cycles and recessions. By analyzing these trends, clients can build models and visualize the historical track record. Clients can also use tools offered by Emotomy to implement investment strategies improvements over a 20-year basis.
A stable and evolving Emotomy
Dr. Beaudan explained that digitalization is about user experience, much more than about the product itself. Emotomy bases their tech tools and investment planning tools on research-based data on current market trends. Undoubtedly, Emotomy is highly skilled at adapting and improving their systems and platforms. The one caveat with this is complexity:
“I view a software company as a mountain made of little grains of sand. You understand every grain of sand, because you coded it and you know exactly what it does. At some point, you have tens of thousands of grains of sand and so the whole edifice becomes complex, just because there are so many little parts. Managing complexity is key.”
The dilemma becomes how to keep the system functional; since it is all object driven, it is going to be easy to find problems. How do you keep building more and more complex systems that are highly stable? That is one of the main challenges that Patrick cites, and it explains why Emotomy has a slight edge over its competition. Emotomy is not encumbered with being loyal to investors such as VCs or anybody else. Dr. Patrick Beaudan controls the company and prioritizes tasks according to what is best for its clients.
The near future
With almost $4 billion of assets under management, Emotomy is not in a hurry to hire big teams. Patrick optimistically says he would like to be at $10B by the end of 2019. He does not need to build a huge company and is not interested in managing loads of people. He is more concerned with keeping his clients happy:
“I think that’s our main challenge. Not making any missteps in integrations. Being attractive to the bigger players, whom we need as clients in order to grow. These are the real challenges. Then keeping all of the clients happy is our ultimate goal.”
To accomplish this, Emotomy would like to have more integrations with key custodians. Indeed, everything I learned points to the fact that Emotomy is becoming a bigger company by making the knowledge and technology available to as many people as possible.
WealthTech Club takeaways
We are seeing an ever-growing amount of WealthTech players in the field, but few stand out. Emotomy both surprised me and surpassed my initial thoughts of what the solution offered. It is really a unique digital wealth-management platform that helps advisors to digitalize their business in a way that is totally customizable and flexible.
Interviewed by Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and co-owner at INSART, FinTech & Java engineering company. Vasyl is also author of the WealthTech Club, which conducts research into Fortune and Startup Robo-advisor and Wealth Management companies in terms of the technology ecosystem.