Accelerating fund movement in wealth management

Payments fintech Monoova helps businesses automate and scale large complex ongoing transaction flows. It has a significant role to play in the wealth management industry, according to chief executive officer Christian Westerlind Wigstrom. It already works with a number of firms in superannuation and believes its service has a lot to offer in terms of speeding up flows of funds.

"In some ways as soon as you are in a business that requires movement of funds ... there is probably a role for us somewhere," Wigstrom says.

"When it comes to the wealth management industry [it's a] prominent industry [and] often has been able to progress new tech on lots of fronts but, on the other hand, has often had restrictions replaced on it for obvious good reasons"

The first role that Monoova can play in the wealth management industry is in assisting people to move funds around to fund the management of their wealth. Monoova's service can be a faster and more efficient way to move funds, compared to something like BPAY.

"We can make that real time...it is also possible to personalise much more," Wigstrom says.

Monoova and NPP

The New Payments Platform (NPP) has been working with industry to create the Mandated Payments Services (MPS) capability, which will enable customers to authorise third parties to initiate payments from their bank accounts using the NPP. Osko is an NPP enabled service.

When the mandated payment service goes live later this year, Monoova expects to be able to have an even greater role in the wealth management industry.

"There are often some regulatory challenges to the wealth management industry," Wigstrom says.

"At the moment it is not possible in the Australian payment infrastructure to have a third party supporting you with payments initiation without that party also touching those funds. What is very exciting about mandated payment services [is the ability to] transfer funds without ever touching those funds."

Superannuation applications

Eventually, NPP and fintechs like Monoova could enable the faster automation of superannuation contribution debits and payments.

"You can automate away the manual process without inserting anyone else into the transaction," Wigstrom says.

Monoova has been working with the Longevity App (which enables consumers to add small amounts to their superannuation whenever they transact) and is involved with at least one other superannuation business.

"We have taken the approach [that] we will start by understanding the industry from the bottom up...it is also an industry that would benefit enormously form the kind of services we can offer," Wigstrom says of superannuation.