Zorion partners with WealthOS to support their international expansion

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Zorion has chosen WealthOS as their strategic back and middle office technology partner, supporting international market expansion plans.
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WealthOS will support Zorion’s expansion plans to push out their mobile platform in Malaysia, Bahrain and thereafter, expand into the UK.
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31 January 2023 London (UK). In signing a master service agreement, Zorion Technology Limited (“Zorion”), taps into WealthOS' robust operating system for digital wealth management ecosystems, reaping the benefits of their cloud-native infrastructure, modular features, third party integrations marketplace, as well as fully automated and orchestrated workflows.
Zorion is an investment app that empowers potential investors to create long-term investment plans that are profitable, but also good for the planet, have a positive social impact and are fully in line with individual values such as Shariah Compliant stocks and ESG stocks.
WealthOS is a cloud-native operating system providing the backend technology, infrastructure and processes for digital investing, retirement and wealth management products.
Zorion will use  WealthOS’ core digital wealth management modules, including client onboarding, transactions, securities (whole and fractional stocks and ETFs), trade order management, recordkeeping, payments, transfers, as well as different account types and tax wrappers.
With support from WealthOS, Zorion expands their plans geographically to push out their mobile platform in Malaysia, Bahrain and thereafter, expand into the UK.
WealthOS' single platform is truly global, providing Zorion with a consistent backend technology and operational experience in each target region. This makes it easy for Zorion to export its digital wealth management platform from one region to another, opening the doors for speedy market entry. This partnership allows Zorion to focus on developing a great customer experience while the WealthOS backend infrastructure keeps pace with Zorion’s plans for market expansion across each targeted region.
Regardless of investment or trading experience, Zorion is a one-stop platform for investors who desire to invest in diversified investment portfolios that bring in long-term growth, aligning with their ethical, legal, social, and spiritual values.
Zoltan Bourne, Founder/CEO, Zorion 

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"WealthOS allows us to focus on the things that matter, instead of reinventing the wheel, allowing us to hit the market faster. We will strategically migrate our backend to the WealthOS platform to better support our go-to-market plans.”
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Anton Padmasiri, Co-founder/CEO, WealthOS

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“We created WealthOS to support the next generation of digital wealth management products, and with Zorion we get to help them scale their unique value proposition faster and cheaper, so clients get to invest in their futures in the way that aligns with their values and beliefs.”
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–Ends– 
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About Zorion 
Zorion Technology Limited is a visionary early-stage fintech start-up company that creates innovative investment solutions for the individual investor regardless of their investment experience. The platform's primary focus is to make available a legal, safe, reliable, ethical, fully regulated, and compliant mobile platform allowing retail clients to build diversified investment portfolios for long-term growth. By developing a one-stop shop to suit everyone's needs, from buying a single stock to building complex portfolios.
About WealthOS
WealthOS is the cloud-native, modularised operating system SaaS for digital wealth management products. Founded in 2019 and currently available in the UK, WealthOS helps wealth managers to achieve their digital transformation and product launches three times faster and 40% cheaper. As a minority-founded business, operating across the UK and Sri Lanka, we firmly believe in building digital infrastructure that enables equitable financial access for everyone, everywhere. Learn more at <a href="http://www.wealthos.cloud/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.wealthos.cloud&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1675246837362000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1gZ652E2XdOtmWiuZrykT_">www.wealthos.cloud</a> or follow us on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/52188756/admin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.linkedin.com/company/52188756/admin/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1675246837362000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0FsQw8OjA3Np9zdj2STaS_">Linkedin</a>.

Zorion partners with WealthOS to support their international expansion

<h1>Pensions Tech: A Harsh Reality </h1>
In our previous blog, Anton traced the <a href="https://wealthos.cloud/the-evolution-of-the-sipp/">evolution of the SIPP</a> from a niche product that holds anything from property to fine wine for HNWs to the essential tax-efficient account type of any wealth proposition. In pensions, there is a clear mismatch between what customers have come to expect as a digital customer experience (CX) and the legacy back-end systems that are supposed to enable it. So, here is our take on the harsh realities facing pensions tech today, as bridging this gap will impact the brand and bottom line for SIPP providers. 

Disclaimer: All puns intended. 

Keeping Up with the Regulations

Pensions tech faces the same broader technology challenges, as they apply to any other wealth vertical. While many processes remain analogue, digitalisation of customer experience is a time-consuming and expensive affair. The fact that very few SIPP tech options are available out there makes the buying decision a lesser of two evils. 

Regulation change is continuous and constant and when you only have the on-prem route, it leads to long release cycles. Where system upgrades are developed, installed, regression tested, bugs-fixed, and re-introduced, you never really have an up-to-date system for very long. While this is a problem with any on-prem system, we feel it’s more of an issue for pensions because of the pace of regulatory change.

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The Only Way is Fragmentation 

Our second bugbear is the fragmentation of the value chain and the different technology components that have to come together to support a modern SIPP. 

A day in the life of a SIPP provider requires stringing together several services to administer a basic SIPP—from opening accounts, taking money, clearing money, offering a universe of securities, trading them, supporting withdrawals, payroll integrations with HMRC, reporting to clients and regulators, taking fees and the list goes on. Currently, many specialist SIPP tech products do not include the ‘peripheral’ capabilities of trading, cash management, dividends and corporate actions, etc. Instead, you have to engage in block play using different brands of blocks, forcing different technology components together to try and fit your needs. 

If customers were happy to be onboarded via manual application forms and PDFs, this may not pose a challenge, because it is a matter of putting bodies behind screens to input and process data. However, the lack of end-to-end capabilities inevitably compromises your customer experience, especially when your users have come to expect the seamless onboarding experience they get when signing up for the latest streaming service.

I’m an Inefficiency… Get Me Out of Here

Let’s get into the weeds now. Here’s a true-to-life scenario: 
<ol>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">I want to transfer my pension from A to B </li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">I fill in an application and email it to B </li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">B’s operations team will manually liaise via email with A and let it know about my request</li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">B needs A to confirm my request, how much I have, etc. via email</li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Some back-and-forth communications take place</li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">And so it goes…</li>
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This process can take anything from two weeks to a year! 

An important (and often unmentioned) side-effect of this is the financial loss to the consumer. For example, as a result of the above, I may have missed out on an investment opportunity because I didn’t get timely access to my funds. I’m not a happy customer. This type of inefficiency can impact your brand and reputation. 

Throwing bodies at the problem can only take you so far, as a human’s capacity in this regard is limited compared to a machine. But it’s not just the process that is to blame—the problem also lies with the overall counterparties, with different pension schemes working to different service levels and so forth. So, you are helpless to provide a better service to your customer unless you can leverage modern technology to automate and streamline your basic processes and use your resources more efficiently. 

So You Think You Can Drawdown

Post pension freedoms in 2015, drawdown is one of the main ways in which people access their pensions. This is predominantly, if not exclusively, an offline paper-based process. Very few organisations have a straight-through digital experience for enabling individuals to take their money out. 

What does this mean? When I am ready to take my money out (to get tax-free cash to pay off my mortgage or supplement my regular employment income), I want to get hold of my money in a timely manner. Unfortunately, I am told it’s going to take me at least 20 days. Again, I am not a happy customer. 

The decumulation side of pensions, which is a large market post-pension freedoms, remains almost exclusively offline. The only reason for this is that the tech solutions available to the pensions industry have not kept up with the modern capabilities, already prevalent across sister industries (banking and insurance) to enable seamless digital drawdown. 

In Conclusion

These problems just need some love and attention—leveraging modern technologies like the cloud and APIs to get your services communicating with each other, automating repetitive tasks, and orchestrating services to provide a seamless experience.

As it so happens, WealthOS has creatively leveraged modern technology to bring your customer experience into the modern age. Our platform is cloud-native, so you have shorter release cycles. We have fully orchestrated workflows and our open API layer makes building great CX a breeze. We have all the capabilities needed to run a SIPP under a single hood to avoid tech fragmentation. Get in touch with us - shri@wealthos.cloud if you would like to learn more.

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Pensions Tech: A Harsh Reality

WealthOS is an enterprise, cloud-native core wealth management SaaS, built to accelerate digital adoption and innovation within the wealth management industry. We dramatically reduce time to market for wealth management products and features whilst reducing the total cost of ownership. We offer an extensive feature-set coupled with pre-built integration to a marketplace of specialist service providers, allowing wealth managers to do more things on a single platform.
Our modular architecture allows you to use WealthOS fully to launch your entire digital value proposition, or in parts to complement an existing proposition. Our API first platform allows you to simply plug, and play.
By leveraging the latest advances in cloud-native technologies, WealthOS offers the wealth management industry the upgraded technology infrastructure needed to launch innovative digital value propositions

WealthOS

WealthOS is an enterprise, cloud-native core wealth management SaaS, built to accelerate digital adoption and innovation within the wealth management industry. We dramatically reduce time to market for wealth management products and features whilst reducing the total cost of ownership. We offer an extensive feature-set coupled with pre-built integration to a marketplace of specialist service providers, allowing wealth managers to do more things on a single platform.

Our modular architecture allows you to use WealthOS fully to launch your entire digital value proposition, or in parts to complement an existing proposition. Our API first platform allows you to simply plug, and play.

By leveraging the latest advances in cloud-native technologies, WealthOS offers the wealth management industry the upgraded technology infrastructure needed to launch innovative digital value propositions