Singapore continues to prove itself a hotbed for robo advisory innovation, with another robo advisor catering to HNWIs having gone live in the Lion City today, the firm’s CEO tells Asian Private Banker.
StashAway, which claims to be the first robo advisor available to anybody in Singapore, has opened its investing platform to both Singaporeans and non-citizens of varying levels of sophistication.
“We have a CMS (capital markets services) license for fund management with no restrictions and this means that we can serve both accredited investors and non-accredited investors,” StashAway CEO and co-founder Michele Ferrario explains.
“After speaking to multiple investors, I can safely say that the product and the platform are a very good fit for both individuals that are just starting in their investing journey and therefore have only a few thousands dollars to invest and want to make monthly commitments of a few hundred or thousand dollars, as well as for more sophisticated investors that have larger sums to manage,” Ferrario said.
The robo advisor “provides its advanced investment framework to unaccredited investors while simultaneously providing the sophistication that accredited investors expect, at a fraction of the cost”, according to a statement from the firm.
The platform does not “engage in securities selection” nor does it offer actively management funds, but it rather provides an assortment of diversified, liquid and low-cost ETFs based on an economic regime-driven asset allocation framework (ERAA), according to StashAway’s website.
“StashAway’s ERAA is designed to ride the ups and downs of the economic cycles. Robo advisors in the US and Europe have already innovated a decades-old wealth management industry, and now we’re innovating robo advisory,” said co-founder and CIO, Freddy Lim.
Ferrario added that StashAway is “cost effective”, with all-in fees of 0.2% for balances above S$1 million.
Singapore in pole position
As of May, more than half of the firms with robo advisory offerings relevant to the region’s HNWIs were headquartered in Singapore, according to Asian Private Banker’s Robo Chart.
While unsurprising – given the city state’s proactive stance towards fostering fintech growth, which includes a number of bilateral agreements with other countries and plenty of monetary incentives – Hong Kong’s watchdog, the SFC, beat the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to the punch by pushing out a draft guideline covering robo advice a month before its counterpart in the city-state published similar guidelines.
Legal experts believe that these consultations, if developed and executed, may hinder the development and use of robo advisors in both cities.
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