My first year as CEO at Wealthify has flown by.
Ordinarily, after a year I’d know my colleagues inside out, having sat next to people in meetings countless times and putting the world to rights over a brew or two. However, lockdown has meant I still haven’t met any of my team in person (which has become less weird as lockdown has progressed), though I do often find myself wondering how tall everyone is – it’s nearly impossible to gauge over a video call!
But working remotely hasn’t slowed us down at all. In the last 12 months we’ve gone from strength to strength, improving our products and services, and managing our investments through rocky markets. And, importantly, we’ve made sure that everything we’ve done follows our purpose – to inspire anyone to build their future wealth.
What guides our growth?
I’m very lucky to be leading a passionate group of people who are all determined to deliver their best performance each and every day. From idea sessions and implementation to compliance and client onboarding, I’m constantly in awe of how much this team cares and achieves.
After a year of being CEO, working closely with the team, and listening to our customers, I understand what makes Wealthify a good business, and how we can become a great one. I like to refer to these as the three A’s:
- Accessibility
- Affordability
- Advocacy
Accessibility
Wealthify was set up to open the doors of investing to anyone, and we’ll always do exactly that. I have a very talented team who have designed a simple customer journey with no jargon or unnecessary complexity, and we use feedback from existing and potential customers to improve our service.
We’re going to continue building on our experience, developing our products, and offering an outstanding service – one that attracts awards, but more crucially, one that our customers love and are happy to tell their friends about.
Affordability
We work hard to keep our operating costs down, and this means we can offer simple, low management fees. This approach allows us to have some of the lowest barriers to entry available in the market, and we do this without compromising on the service we offer.
Thanks to the scale and security of our parent company, Aviva, we’re able to take a long-term approach to competitive pressures and maintain an affordable service that delivers in all the areas that matter to our customers.
Advocacy
I’d like to take this opportunity to personally say ‘thank you’ to our customers for every award vote, each kind comment, all the reviews, and any friends referred to Wealthify. Your support in spreading the word about what we’re doing, really does mean so much to us.
We love getting feedback, whether it’s about what we’re doing well or things we could do better, as we use this to improve ourselves and our business. So please, keep telling us your thoughts and we’ll keep working to give you a service that you’d happily recommend.
Looking Forwards
This last year has helped to pave the way to make our future dreams and aspirations come true, and I’m really excited about Wealthify’s future. To write about everything I’m looking forward to would take a huge amount of space, so I’ve narrowed it down to what I think will be crucial focus areas in the upcoming years:
- Growth – an investment platform like ours needs to grow to maintain its cost-efficient offering. We’re already growing quickly and will continue to by looking after our existing customers, attracting new ones, and developing, improving, and adding to our products and services.
- Ethical Investments – we’ve seen huge interest in our award-winning Ethical investments since they were launched, and the market looks to have caught on over the last year. We want our Ethical investments to actively build towards a better future and we’re working with the wider financial markets to help make this a reality in the future.
- Digital Development – Our customers want things immediately, and rightly so, that’s one of the reasons to use a digital investment management company. We have a great digital journey and have done a lot of work to make this faster. But we will always look for new technology, new partners, and work within existing financial service systems, to move from faster to instant, and continue to improve our digital experience.
- Competition – in the last year we’ve seen several companies enter the UK robo-investor market, and some established ones leave. I think we’ll see more traditional wealth managers start to compete with us as they digitise their service. I’m also expecting technological advances in the banking sector to create new tools that engage traditional savers and move them toward investing. While we’ll keep a close eye on the competition, I'm a big fan of competitive markets when it's used to create better customer experiences.
It’s been a fantastic first year and I know that whatever’s around the corner, my team will take it in their stride. We live in exciting times, and as more and more of us start investing, the power we have to change the world is truly fascinating.
I feel really proud to be leading this amazing team through the challenges ahead, and I’m looking forward to hearing your input and ideas. I know that together we’ll be able to build an investment platform that inspires anyone to build their future wealth.
