10 Best FinTech Companies to Watch 2020
The Silicon Review
“Based on our expertise and domain in Investment Management, we understand that each business has unique needs.”
Most of the time, an investment management firm’s responsibility to manage holdings within their clients’ portfolios to achieve specific objectives is the critical task by which success is measured. The term investment management is synonymous with numerous industry terms such as, wealth management, money management, and portfolio management. A professional investment management firm’s aim is always to meet their clients’ specific investment goals as part of the wealth management stewardship relationship shared between client and advisor. Clients may range from the individual investor to the largest institutions. Irrespective of the client, services offered by these firms include portfolio strategy and implementation, asset allocation, stock selection, monitoring of existing investments, and financial statement analysis. The business of investment management, like any industry, includes maintaining, accounting, and maximizing the utilization of a company’s tangible and in tangible assets. Running a separate investment management department is expensive for a variety of reasons, not limited to, staffing back, middle and front office teams. Include additional duties like conducting internal audits and researching individual assets–or asset classes and industrial sectors and the costs continue to mount. Department leadership must also make sure that they examine all the internal controls and systems, record transactions, account for cash flow and maintain effective oversight of all business data. As a cost-control measure, companies can make use of SaaS based offerings to maximize staff efficiency. Deploying an asset management system into the business stream brings various advantages, including better control over business operations and improved efficiency. Total cost of obtaining, maintaining, and operating assets can be drastically minimized by having an effective system run in peak performance. By deploying a SaaS investment management platform, assets are tracked in real time, accuracy is improved, and all integrated systems have access to data for any additional needs.
BRITech is a British/Brazilian SaaS company based in São Paulo, Brazil. The company was founded in London/UK back in 2012 and it is known for offering the “BRITech Platform” a SaaS based solution for investment management launched in 2014. The main idea of starting a company was to leverage the founders’ knowledge in the investment management business. The founders were part of the business for many years and they wanted to build a platform targeting the small and medium sized companies globally. The first version of their platform was launched in Brazil because one of the founders had an extensive network in the country. Furthermore, the platform was expanded to reach out to the entire investment management ecosystem like broker-dealers, asset managers and wealth managers, as well as fund administrators and custodians. In 2018 BRITech’s operations expanded into the rest of Latin America and it reached Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia.
The mission and vision of the company was to help investment management companies of any size to provide the best possible services that align with their goals. BRITech’s customer base is not limited to small and medium sized companies because large wealth managers and banking institutions have successfully deployed the platform. BRITech’s platform spans the entire investment management spectrum, allowing their clients to provide the best services for their customers.
Recognizing an opportunity to fill a need in the US advisory space, BRITech sought local expertise to improve the deployment experience and accelerate market penetration. MD Solutions had been seeking an opportunity to partner with the perfect technology platform provider for nearly three years prior to choosing BRITech. BRITech’s partnership with MD Solutions created the synergy needed to bring a world-class platform into the over crowded US market through the franchise model.
BRITech’s unparalleled international success and customer satisfaction has been combined with MDS’ extensive services, implementation and support experience. Each firm focusing on their respective strengths will undoubtedly deliver the perfect combination of technology and services to customers that expect high quality services from a trusted vendor.
Bringing over fifteen years of experience as a services provider to the wealth tech space, MDS has a proven consulting, BPO, custom engineering, cloud and support record that is being fully applied to BRITech’s Pivolt Wealth Management platform. Pivolt meets client expectations without compromising on industry requirements or expected functionality. BRITech and MDS are both uncompromising when customer retention is considered. Both firms have dedicated customer support teams and separate customer success teams. The support executives work closely with the success leadership to gain insights from clients into product use and development. The entire process is applied to not only the US franchise, but globally.
MDS became the USA BRITECH franchise at the end of 2019 in part due to the ever-increasing consolidation of the US wealth tech space through M&A activity. Pockets of under-served advisory, management and family office firms are starving for assistance with technology that fits their needs. BRITECH offers a modular SaaS platform that can be configured to meet a prospective customer’s current needs while retaining the flexibility to be easily expanded. Portfolio accounting, portal, billing, CRM and trading modules are all currently available with additional modules being developed. Deployed within the Azure stack with an API for improved integration capabilities, the possibilities are limitless.
BRITech’s latest undertaking for the platform is the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence. A new chat component is being engineered that will allow the financial planner to interact with customers leveraging artificial intelligence to help the planners respond promptly. The microservice architecture in the platform simplifies the localization process. BRITech has different set of rules and regulations for each country to meet different compliance regulations. After working in this field for several years, the founders are well versed in deploying compliant systems.
Initial feedback from customers signing on this year has been overwhelmingly positive with both BRITech and MDS looking forward to leveraging their respective experiences within the partnership to deliver an unparalleled combination of technology and service to the wealth management industry.
Yuryi Ferber Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BRITech
An entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience, Yuryi was previously Founder and CEO of YMF, a market-leading financial software company with 300 employees subsequently acquired by TOTVS. An authority in the Brazilian technology sector, Yuryi is often called upon to advise companies and individuals on best practices and IT solutions. Before founding YMF, Yuryi spent 8 years at Investment Bank GARANTIA (currently Credit Suisse) as a trader and portfolio manager.
Steven Mars Co-founder of MDS and Chief Growth Officer of BRITech-USA
Steven Mars is a Co-founder of MD Solutions responsible for business development and executive leadership. Since 2004, Steven has guided MD Solutions through the creation of multiple service and business verticals aimed at resolving challenges facing the investment management industry. Drawing upon his direct experience in the industry, working as a technology consultant and a professional services provider, Steven has assisted hundreds of clients realize the full value of integrating their staff and technology. Transitioning from a focus on process redesign through the use of on-premise technology to cloud-based solutions, Steven’s focus is now the delivery of world-class cloud-based technology solutions that are industry compliant and economically viable.
As the Chief Growth Officer responsible for introducing the US market to the Pivolt Wealth Management platform, I have the rare opportunity to fill a product/services void in the MDS portfolio that perfectly aligns the top strengths of MDS and BRITech.