By Nigel Singh, CEO of ViewTrade International Australia
The global wealth management industry is constantly evolving, with globalisation driving a growing demand for truly diversified portfolios that span multiple regions, asset classes, and currencies.
This growing demand for diversification is a fundamental shift in the way investors expect to manage and protect their wealth. To truly offer diversified portfolios that can withstand market fluctuations and reduce risk, wealth managers need to go beyond their local markets, enabling better benefits from global economic trends and opportunities.
For instance in Australia, financial advisors and wealth managers have long grappled with the challenges of offering their clients access to global markets. This is because the vast majority of incumbents have not yet mastered cross-border investments given the complexities of navigating different trading environments and compliance requirements.
Driving this is the fact that, until recently, accessing international markets has involved a complex process that highlighted many operational inefficiencies and higher than expected capex costs.
For example, if you want to invest in U.S. equities, you need to go through a different system with its own compliance checks, taxes, and even currency exchange issues. This can make it difficult for wealth managers and investors to easily tap into global opportunities without facing a lot of extra paperwork and fees.
Another challenge is the lack of seamless integration between domestic and international markets. For Australian investors and financial advisors, it’s not always as simple as buying a stock in the U.S. or Europe and adding it to a local portfolio.
Each market has its own set of procedures, and managing multiple platforms or brokers can get complicated. For financial advisors who want to keep things simple and effective for their clients, these barriers can be frustrating, or simply not worth the effort.
Yet massive challenges also represent massive opportunities.
Harnessing the opportunity through a game-changing partnership
The Australian market is ripe with potential, given its huge financial services and wealth sector, exceptional talent pool, and strong yet balanced regulatory landscape.
And at ViewTrade, our particular strength – and enduring passion – has always been cross-border transactions that open up global potential to local investors by making diversification and tapping into global markets easier for financial advisors and the wealth industry.
We currently operate across 30 countries worldwide, with the Australian market being our most recent entry in a partnership with equities clearing business Morrison Securities.
For Australia’s wealth management firms, this enables new avenues for portfolio diversification and, ultimately, better wealth protection for clients – with operational and technological efficiencies. Morrison Securities was the ideal first partner for this move, given its long been a trusted name in the Australian trading space, with 38,000+ active clients who trade over $30 billion annually. However, this new partnership will seamlessly blend Morrison’s strong Australian equities and listed options capabilities with the ability to offer a wider range of global investment opportunities to their clients.
And why else does it matter for the Australian market?
This means that financial advisors and wealth managers can now extend global equity and options trading, fixed income, managed investments, and other financial instruments into their value proposition.
A partnership with ViewTrade also provides the flexibility to choose between a fully disclosed model or an omnibus model, catering to the specific needs of their clients.
The future of wealth management is here
