By Kristofer Rogers, Senior Vice President for ANZ, Volt.io
For many Australians, building wealth has traditionally meant getting into property. With housing increasingly difficult to afford, investing is becoming an important alternative for people looking to build wealth over time.
WealthTech is driving this shift by democratising investment through technology innovation, making it easier than ever to invest in financial markets across the globe.
Digital investment platforms have made financial markets easier to enter, giving everyday investors access to products and tools that were once harder or more expensive to reach. Lower minimums, fractional investing, and digital onboarding have helped bring a much broader audience into the market.
It’s a significant change in a country where property has long been such a dominant part of the wealth-building conversation. The question now is what happens as that audience grows.
Wealthtech has opened the market
For much of the investing industry, the first wave of innovation was about accessibility.
Digital platforms removed the friction involved in getting started. Investors could open an account without paperwork or a traditional adviser, start with smaller amounts, and access fractional investments. Automated tools also brought basic portfolio construction and guidance within reach of people who previously have been priced out of professional advice.
Today, everyday investors can discover an opportunity, research it, and make a decision from the same device they use for almost everything else. That has raised expectations around the investment experience itself.
As investing becomes more digital, expectations around access are changing too. For everyday investors, access increasingly means being able to engage with financial markets when it suits them, rather than being constrained by traditional financial services hours.
Investors are already participating differently
The behaviour of investors is a useful indication of where that experience is heading.
At Volt.io , we see this through our work with investment and trading platforms such as Pepperstone and Trade Nation. Our platform data shows that 67 per cent of deposits happen outside traditional banking hours, with more than one in four taking place between Friday evening and Sunday night. Investors are already engaging with these platforms around their own lives rather than within the traditional rhythms of financial services.
The pattern extends beyond when investors fund their accounts. Repeat payers account for 84 per cent of deposit value across our data, showing that for many customers, investing has become an ongoing behaviour rather than a one-off transaction.
That is an important distinction as wealthtech moves further into the mainstream. The industry is no longer simply making investing available to a wider audience. It is supporting an investor base that is engaging with financial markets as part of everyday life.
That changes the infrastructure question. Based on the behaviour we’re seeing, it is equally important that supporting capabilities such as payments are available on the same terms. With payment infrastructure increasingly operating 24/7, investors can fund their accounts when they are ready to act, rather than waiting for traditional banking hours.
Infrastructure makes access real
Access to investing is binary. An investor can open an account or they cannot. Participation is different. It depends on what happens once that account is open.
An investor might have access to the right platform and products, yet still encounter friction when they want to act. The quality of the underlying infrastructure can influence how easily they can move through the investment experience and whether that experience encourages them to keep participating.
This is particularly relevant as investing becomes more accessible to people who may be making smaller, more regular contributions, and managing their finances digitally. The infrastructure supporting the platform needs to accommodate that behaviour rather than introduce new points of friction further along the journey.
That is where the distinction between access and participation becomes important. Wealthtech has made it easier to get into the market. The infrastructure supporting it helps determine whether people can make meaningful use of that access.
The cost of leaving infrastructure behind
The consequences extend beyond convenience.
If the systems supporting a platform are slow, fragmented, or difficult to scale, friction can affect the relationship between an investor and the platform. Customers may find it harder to act when they want to, less inclined to return, or less confident in the service they are using.
That matters because meaningful participation is a prerequisite for financial outcomes. Infrastructure cannot determine whether an investor makes a good decision or earns a particular return. It can, however, influence whether they are able to participate consistently enough for those outcomes to become possible.
This is the next challenge for wealthtech. The industry has spent years lowering the barriers to entry. As that work brings more people into financial markets, the infrastructure underneath those platforms needs to support the participation that follows.
The first wave of wealthtech democratised access to investing. The next will be measured by what that access enables people to do.
