The financial technology house JHC is a global player, with a proven track record, working with financial institutions as they grapple with a mass of client, regulatory and other demands. As recently as 31 May, it issued a white paper called Compliance and Regulation in UK Wealth Management: Perspectives, Budgets, Views and Intentions, giving a flavour of how it continues to push itself forward. The firm’s JHC Figaro (Figaro) and JHC Neon (Neon) offerings are already familiar parts of the landscape.

The firm has four offices across the UK and Dubai; it has 260 staff. More than 60 financial institutions use its services. Assets under management of the clients range from £100 million all the way up to over £15 billion ($19.6 billion), and in total, the pool of money of JHC clients stands at £160 billion.

Tells us about the history of the business
JHC was formed in 1985. Back then, we recognised that the trading and management of financial instruments would be much improved if the process were automated. So we set about building a real time, multi-currency, back-office settlement and accounting system. A few releases later, we attracted our first major client, which was one of the London Stock Exchange’s oldest and most prestigious firms: Charles Stanley & Co Limited. The firm remains a client today—an endorsement and partnership of which we’re more than proud.

JHC Founders are still at the core of the business giving a constancy that is a demonstration of our commitment to our clients and is key to our past and ongoing success. It also means that we can say hand on heart that not one of our fintech peers has a better understanding of the wealth management business than we do. With half of our execs having joined in the last five years—all of whom came from diverse and multinational fintech operations—the JHC team of today combines the best of the old with the best of the new. Never a business to rest on our laurels, we continue to innovate and invest back into our products and technology.

What is the strategy for this business?
We’re ambitious. Hence our partnerships with firms around the world and the opening of our latest  office in Dubai. JHC’s platforms and tools are as relevant and valuable  Our latest collaboration is a global partnership agreement with Thomson Reuters, who have added our Neon product to their Eikon App Studio. In addition, we’ve recently set up an agreement with US fintech firm Vertical Management Systems to provide our clients with a further source of high quality market data. On the other side of the globe, leading Auckland based consulting and investment oversight firm, MyFiduciary has been partnered with to combine our digital solutions and their regional expertise to enter the Australia and New Zealand market.  Other strategic affiliations are in the pipeline, each of which has been carefully selected to enhance the attractions of our products and services to clients.

What would You say is the main target of this business
What are we here for? A. To help financial institutions get their businesses into shape for the future. Unlike some our peers, we never claim that our technologies directly help firms up their profits—you employ people to do that. What we do say is that our technologies save firms money by 1) reducing or containing costs and 2) making the business overall, more efficient. Or put another way, our platforms and tools enable firms to increase revenues and scale their operation accordingly—without adding to their cost baseand that can only be good for margins…

What sort of trends do you see in the market and how has this affected JHC?
The world changes, our clients change, we change. Until a few years ago, it was true to say that we were a one-trick pony, but a winning pony, nevertheless. Over two decades, Figaro platform has become the trading platform of choice for 60+ UK wealth managers. Figaro is a big, powerful admin and accounting product and in many respects it is the enterprise engine that drives the institution. But there is more to wealth management than account administration, trading, regulatory compliance and resource optimisation. Capitalising on our hard-won knowledge and expertise, we have developed additional digital tools, some of which are as valuable to the end investor (think millennials!) as they are to any stockbroker or investment manager: here’s our current product line up:

JHC Neon: a digital wealth management dashboard for instant portfolio monitoring, risk analysis and suitability checking. The tool is back office agnostic and able to aggregate portfolio data from multiple internal and external sources.

JHC Digitize: our consultancy arm. Through Digitize, we can channel our fintech expertise and digital capabilities to develop strategies and technologies that winning businesses, in any financial sector, need to accomplish a successful digital transformation.

JHC Xenon: our digital wealth management app that enables end clients to monitor and interact with their portfolios.

Describe the big challenges you see for the wealth sector
The difficulties facing wealth managers right now are costs, competition and compliance. The mystique that once surrounded wealth management has gone: transparency, efficiency and service are the order of the day. So continuing with the old ways of working, is not an option—you either automate or pick up your ball and go home. For some that’s no easy call. The demands of regulatory change for example, are such that firms have little bandwidth, budget or appetite to instigate radical operational changes. Even so, those entities that can stay on top of regulation and bring their business up to speed digitally, will be leaders of the pack tomorrow. Automation contains or reduces the firm’s headcount, optimises resources and equips the business to meet the needs of the market it elects to serve. No matter which niche you occupy—the everyday retail investor, HNWs or UHNW clients, or all three—digital working is the only way forward.

There are signs that firms are starting to swap their spreadsheets for software, but a significant number of institutions are still behind the automation curve. As a service provider we do occasionally wonder if firms realise how many tasks and processes are perfect candidates for automation—compliance being a case in point. When the business is up against it, relying on people to beat out the daily bush fires of compliance, is wasteful, expensive and unnecessarily stressful. By integrating compliance routines into front, middle and back office workflows, our platforms mitigate the regulatory burden and the costs. In a nutshell, we do compliance, so you don’t have to.

What would you see as the value-add that JHC delivers?
How we make a difference. The fintech industry can never be accused of under promising— ‘solutions’ abound. In reality, it is difficult, if not impossible, to build products that meet every need, of every firm, of every type, all the time. That might explain why clients sometimes see a role for our technology - that we hadn’t, which is precisely what occurred with our client LGT Vestra (Vestra). Having made Neon available to the firm’s 100+ managers, initially to do no more than automate the suitability monitoring process, Vestra soon realised that Neon was capable of far greater things. As well as helping Vestra meet its suitability obligations, Neon is revealing new oversights, insights and trading opportunities. Starting with the big picture, managers can drill down—instantly—to the smallest detail, via their desktop or tablet. As well as enabling Vestra to engage with their clients more frequently and on a fully informed basis, Neon is also creating a tangible, commercial advantage for the firm overall.

What of the future? When new trends or opportunities arise, our clients look to us to help them capitalise on those developments. Artificial Intelligence, the cloud, machine learning, the internet of things and blockchain are areas of information technology that are of interest, or soon will be, to financial institutions and ourselves. The technologies we develop for the wealth management sector also hold potential for other financial institutions. Neon for example, pinpoints and analyses trends and patterns as they begin to form - the sort of intelligence that providers of financial services can utilise to commercial advantage. A pension company (for example) could use Neon to monitor drawdown and contribution behaviours. In fact any bank, insurer, or asset manager that wishes to understand the dynamics that are shaping their business, to add value to their services or wants to engage more fully with their customers, could extract immense value from the insights that Neon provides.