Yet traditional wealth management institutions are remarkably ill-equipped to cater to the growing demand from their clients. While technology makes it a breeze to trade shares and other securities, private bankers often lack the right tools to find their clients a new holiday home or sell their rare watch collections. Swiss fintech startup WealthInitiative has launched a platform geared towards the needs of wealth management institutions to facilitate such transactions.

The WealthInitiative platform is used internally to help wealth management institutions explore synergies among their own clients. It creates a secure market place where client assets can easily be traded. The platform is available as a cloud-based solution or can be hosted on banks’ IT infrastructure.

Unlike startups that seek to disrupt the traditional wealth management business model, Zurich-based WealthInitiative offers a solution that aims to bolster private banks’ competitive edge. By facilitating secure and efficient transactions in real estate, art and passion investments, WealthInitiative enhances wealth managers’ value proposition in relation to asset classes that are often most dear to their clients’ hearts.

By matching supply and demand through a trusted platform, private banks avoid the steep fees normally charged by intermediaries allowing them to generate additional revenues. Moreover, the platform speeds up transactions, enhances confidentiality, and significantly lowers the costs for clients, leading to a superior client experience.

In the near future, WealthInitiative will allow various wealth management institutions to securely reach out and connect with each other, multiplying transaction flow, and creating additional opportunities for their clients. WealthInitiative is also working on the integration of blockchain technology to allow tracing provenance and ownership of assets traded on its platform, which will further add to the security of transactions.

WealthInitiative founder Douglas Azar said: “I strongly believe that creating synergies among clients is the next growth driver for wealth management institutions. Throughout my experience in private banking and art investment research, I kept on wondering about the lack of tools that would allow private banks to better exploit this untapped potential. WealthInitiative was born out of a desire to fill this gap.”