Good day, now with the excellently organized client conference in Venice behind us, I wanted to take the opportunity, given my role as compere to share some learnings that emerged thanks to the contribution of both our guests, and client presenters.

Clearly clients operating within different financial organizations and sectors of the market will set out to innovate in different ways, but the event highlighted common themes that are worth individually reflecting on.

First, sustainability is a key attribute and objective for many different forms of innovation that clients undertake. This is obviously more frequently connected to investment solution design for all wealth management clientele, but it is also very much present when firms are deploying technology to support their proposition and seeking to deliver accessibility and personalization to a diversified customer base. Second, clients remain committed to continue to invest in innovation despite very significant challenges that are disrupting operational models, and undermining client investment confidence. Innovators focus on the client experience are enacting new engagement channels and strategies to underscore that they can support highly personal situations, while also maintaining alignment to preferences in a secure and resilient way.

The conference also highlighted how far organizations have already come in rethinking the way that they collaborate with 3rd parties and create valuable strategic partnerships . Whereas the last decade was very much built around many larger firms trying to leverage new technologies, and deployment models on their own, many more firm have come to realize that the return on investment and time from such an approach doesn’t make sense when there is a very vibrant, nimble, and commercially aligned ecosystem of fintech and wealthtech firms ready and waiting to augment and enhance a firm’s core competences. This has allowed financial organizations to externalize a lot more of their capabilities into new business opportunities, while also reducing the cost, complexity, and compliance overheads that drive new capital formation and allocation.

It was also great to see that innovation efforts that are client centric are also accelerating platform modernization efforts, and that we, Objectway, have a significant role to play in enabling this in a sustainable way. Many firms highlighted during the event that working with Objectway, a multi-faceted solution’s provider, have enabled them to incrementally manage a larger roadmap, generating a step-by-step return on investment that also delivers more confidence, and reliability to key stakeholders.

Thought our clients might not have shared this in an obvious sense, their approach, which was also highlighted through our various expert speakers, was very much aligned to our innovation matrix and Innovation Diamond framework, unveiled for the first time in Venice. In particular, the event highlighted that when initiatives holistically include the client experience, business operational model, and offering design, they will achieve key results in terms of satisfaction, profitability and scale that would not have been realized through a point solution approach.

I hope that this conclusion will continue to resonate, and that the additional objective in terms of sustainability will be recognized as a pervasive feature in innovation programs for many years.