Welcome to Novigi’s Quarterly Report for Q4 FY2024, our regular update on the trends and topics that are driving our thinking on all things technology, data, and wealth management. If you’re a return reader, welcome back; you know the drill. If you’ve never read the Novigi Quarterly Report before, we hope you find it insightful and informative, and we apologise in advance for our smarmy sense of humour. In this quarter’s report, we are excited to introduce an exclusive regulatory update on superannuation brought to you by Jonathan Steffanoni, Managing Partner at Legal & Prudential Advisors. Jonathan’s updates have long been our go-to for understanding what’s happening in the world of regulation, and we’re thrilled to be collaborating with him, having plagiarised him on the sly for many years. But please, get comfy, block out some focus time in your calendar, and read on — and, as always, let us know if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you.
The Quarter at a Glance
Covered in this quarter’s report are:
Platform Consolidation
Going from multiple platforms to one is hard. And yet, wealth management organisations often must. M&A, changing vendors, deprecating legacy systems, and digital transformation all necessitate platform consolidation. How can we ensure that it’s done safely and efficiently? Speaking from experience — planning, choice of delivery methodology, and a robust approach to data integrity and reconciliation can make all the difference.
Data Management Solutions
At Novigi, we talk about data management solutions a lot. True to form, we’ve done it a lot in this quarter’s report. But what exactly is a data management solution? What kinds of features and functionality should you expect one to have in 2024? We discuss the kinds of business problems that wealth management firms are looking to solve with data management solutions, and the componentry they need to solve them.
Complaints and Dispute Resolution
It’s been three years since we wrote about RG 271, and it continues to be our most read article to date. This demonstrates to us that people and organisations continue to have questions about internal dispute resolution. We still think that data and technology lie at the heart of the solution. In this article, we unpack what has changed over the last three years, and what firms need to consider as they bridge the gap between reality and expectations of complaints management processes.
Investments
It turns out that investment managers, like the rest of us, have data problems. The rise of private market assets has made it more difficult for them to aggregate data. And the growing importance of sustainability, sanctions, and screening means that data aggregation is essential. Being able to produce reliable look-through (a.k.a. drill down) views of hierarchies of asset holdings remains a challenge for many investment managers, but some combination of existing data management solutions and artificial intelligence could help.
Cyber
You may have noticed the IT outage that recently plunged businesses all over the world into chaos. Over the past few months there have been four high profile technology incidents that caught our attention: the XZ Utils backdoor, the UniSuper outage, the Iress hack, and the Crowdstrike incident. In light of these, we’ve been thinking about trust and dependency in modern technology, and the sheer number and variety of actors involved in keeping our systems running. Read more
AI
Just a couple of years ago everyone was talking about blockchain as if it was going to completely revolutionise the world of technology. Now we’re having the same kinds of conversations about AI. While we patiently wait for our investments in obscure cryptocurrencies to come good, we thought it was worth reflecting on the similarities and differences between blockchain and AI. Spoilers: we think the hype around AI has a little more basis than it did for blockchain.
Super Regulation
As mentioned, this quarter’s regulatory update is brought to you by Jonathan Steffanoni of Legal & Prudential Advisors.
Key Contributors:
Kevin Fernandez is General Manager, Market Strategy and Propositions at Novigi, and is based in the Melbourne office.
Sophie Bowen-James is an analyst in the Market Strategy and Propositions team at Novigi, and is based in the Sydney office.
For more information about anything you’ve read here, or if you have a more general inquiry, please contact us.