Security
According to Hesom, Wela is making a sustained effort to ensure a high level of security on the platform. The data is protected from being copied, while PPI information is all encrypted. The back-end and APIs are monitored constantly. Eventually, they’ll add a tool for automatic API monitoring to save manual effort for other activities.
Sales and marketing
The company’s strategy for driving new clients is being a thought leader in their space. Matt says they also have many friends in the industry, and that this network is a great source of value. That’s why they strive to continue building strong relationships with peers.
Matt: “Partnerships with custodians and other technology and software will continue to be more and more valuable over time.”
Room for Wela’s growth
Hesom says it’s a challenge for such a small company to compete with bigger, established companies. They’re also limited in their capacity because of the size. However, they plan to enlarge teams as long as new clients arrive, so the company is waiting for new sales and hopes it will vitalize them.
At the same time, Matt notices that gaining technology adoption from advisors within a firm is very slow now. So the main challenge for Wela is to gain this adoption and spur action from industry individuals. Another difficulty is staying focused on the strategy they choose for Benjamin.
Matt: “There’s a lot of options and opportunities for [Benjamin] to do a lot more, but we have to make sure that there are specific goals in it, and that we accomplish them to the fullest before we move on to next steps.”
There are many things in the company that are still only prospects and require further implementation. Nevertheless, Wela has a lot of promising plans. They’ll continue integrating with other custodians and services such as Facebook Messenger. The team is discussing Google Vision API integration right now, as well as building a mobile app for rendering graphs and charts to complement text messages. Also, they are striving to take emotions out of their platform and apply the knowledge of a wider range of advisors to it. In the next year, they want to continue investing time and budget into building tools for the chatbot.
Hesom: “Making that implementation of the chatbot was very turnkey. So, if we sign up more clients, and they want to have a custom flow, Matt and I won’t be doing it. We’d give them a tool; they go and create the conversations.”
Takeaways
It’s always inspiring to see new, innovative ideas. The Wela team has a long way to go before their solution turns into something big; however, the prospects are great. I hope that very soon we will see all their plans fulfilled and tons of customers getting a brand-new experience while using this advisor software.
Interviewed by Vasyl Soloshchuk, CEO and co-owner at INSART, FinTech & Java engineering company. Vasyl is also the author of WealthTech Club, which conducts research into Fortune and Startup Robo-advisor and Wealth Management companies in terms of the technology ecosystem.