Singapore-based BetterTradeOff (BTO) focuses on upgrading financial planning to become life-planning. Using the latest banking-grade technology and user-centric design thinking, BTO developed a life-planning SaaS solution called “Aardviser” to guide people to take optimum decisions when financing their dreams. This flexible, modular, white-label solution can efficiently and quickly capture a customer’s, new prospect or existing client, financial situation (KYC/FNA) to immediately engage him or her in relevant and exciting life solutions. This direct display of relevancy builds a true trust-based client-relationship.

Aardviser blends intuitive functionality with accuracy and is designed for advisers to easily match a client’s life situations with relevant financial products. Recognizing that every person’s life is uniquely complex, Aardviser captures every detail of it: salary, expenses, education costs, job progression, retirement, wedding, properties, investments, and insurance into a digital collaborative space where financial advisers and their clients can comprehensively plan towards making dreams become reality.

In Singapore, 56% of the market is anxious about retirement (above average between ages 35-49), especially women (62%), but they are unlikely to seek financial advice (82% of people) because they don’t want to feel pressured by the “hard-sell” techniques they face.

BTO’s holistic framework helps to elicit and track the customer’s full financial situation. By detailing the customer’s future financial life-event goals and priorities, called “Dreams” and applying adviser- supplied products and strategies to achieve those Dreams over the lifetime.
Within a month of launching Aardviser, BTO has had 21 prospects lined up in 3 different countries. The positive feedback from people and institutions in the industry has motivated BTO to take the next step towards gaining more recognition and traction in the market.

Advantages:
Advisers can show the direct relevance in a customer’s life by presenting tailor fit solutions that are understandable, affordable, and of maximum benefit in their customer’s life, in a way that the customer can understand by using intuitive visuals in the context of the customer’s personal life. The efficiency gains of the rapid onboarding, dynamic KYC/FNA, standardized (compliance pre-approved) Financial Plan presentation, and institution-wide collaboration will free-up important time for the advisers to focus on identifying new prospects and grooming existing client relationships instead of low-value manual tasks.

Powerful analytics, decision assistance, and insight-driven reporting will guide junior advisers towards next best-steps, and knowledge transfer and training from senior advisers will help to uplift the entire organization’s skillset leading to improved customer servicing, reputation gain, and better trust-based client relationships.

How it works
BTO proposes the “Trust Continuum”, a transaction of information-for-relevancy between the customer and the Adviser, as a framework to help customers overcome their distrust and fear, so that customers can discover their true future needs and thereby understand how financial products fit into their lives. They quickly capture the salient financial parameters of the customer, assign intelligent statistical models to begin a realistic discussion, then easily elicit Dreams and their priorities to show powerful relevancy in the unique life-situation of the customer.

The stages of the engaging, empowering, servicing, and closing using the BetterTradeOff solution are illustrated through 3 features:

Feature 1: Onboarding
BTO quickly capture the basics of: age, income, residency, spouse, dependants, housing, existing products, existing assets, retirement assumptions, and risk appetite.  They smoothly blend this with country-specific statistical models allowing them to immediately present a “likely” (95% accuracy) financial model for the customer. It’s enough to get a highly-relevant conversation started, and generally they will divulge if pressed for information. However, since information disrupts the Trust Continuum, BTO bootstrap past any blockers with their statistical models to correct at a later stage in the collaborative journey.

Feature 2: Dashboard
On the interactive and dynamic dashboard, BTO can immediately see if a cashflow problem occurs in the customer’s future. BTO also show that there is a huge netwealth capacity in their life, the area under the curve, together with the Dreams and their assumed retirement on the curve, as well as a status-at-a-glance view of their income, expense, assets, and debts below the graph.

Feature 3: Product Gap Analysis
By applying customizable business logic, as institution requires, BTO look at a household configuration and existing product inventory to detect what are required or likely products that a customer may need. In the figure below, the target household already has medical insurance, so the adviser can select from a library or customize a specific Term Life Insurance and offer it to the customer. The adviser-recommendation is confirmed by a required “acknowledgement of suitability” for compliance audit if required.

Why we selected BetterTradeOff (BTO) for DIA Amsterdam?
At DIA we see 10 elements that drive our Top 10 Insurtech Trends for 2018. One of them is Empathy Empowered. According to many headlines algorithms are displacing human advisers, saving costs. We believe there is ample opportunity to create the best of both worlds by combining new digital technologies with human skills. To relate to their customers, financial institutions need to secure the feelings side. Humans inject emotion, empathy, passion, creativity, and can deviate from the procedure if needed. Deploying technology to empower human front liners such as brokers and agents results in better conversations, higher conversion and finally, greater solutions for customers.

BTO addresses this trend. The whole financial industry has recognized the need for a new generation of financial planning solutions which brings institutions and clients closer. BetterTradeOff ‘s solution “Aardviser” meet this exact need

Who is BetterTradeOff (BTO)?
Founded in 2015 in Singapore, by Robert Lonsdorfer with a mission to bring personalised life-planning to everyone, empowering all to reach their dreams and achieve lifetime financial security.Robert is the driving force and vision behind BTO. Prior to BTO, he was a Managing Director for UBS, the Group CIO for the largest property developer in the middle east. Having been an entrepreneur and C-level across industries in multiple countries for the last 25 years, Robert is passionate about driving a paradigm shift in the financial services industry.

Robert Lonsdorfer, Founder and CEO of BetterTradeOff 

“Aardviser has been designed to reflect the uniqueness of the lifestyle of everyone removing complicated financial jargon, integrating seamlessly with their social environment and shifting discussions from product centric to lifestyle centric. Aardviser offers a fully transparent, collaborative, easy to use, yet holistic solution to a new generation of advisers and customers in need of trust and belief for the future.” Robert Lonsdorfer, Founder and CEO of BetterTradeOff 

Website: www.bettertradeoff.com

Presenter 1: Robert Lonsdorfer
Presenter 2: Vincent Weber

Contact info: Shaaleni S
Email: [email protected]