How Opti put the power of big data in the hands of all investors
From bus driver to billionaire, Opti launched to deliver the same market-leading investment opportunities for everyone. Less than three years later, it’s on its way to becoming the biggest independent asset management company in Sweden, by offering unrivalled access to ultra-diversified portfolios - the key to more consistent returns. Using Tink’s technology to help deliver a slick user experience, taking five minutes from start to getting your portfolio, Opti is keeping complexity firmly in the background.
Opti launched to give everyone access to market-leading investments.
Independent and technology driven, it offers unrivalled portfolio diversification.
Onboarding is quick and simple, investigating the user’s economy and risk level, and seamlessly linking to bank accounts through Tink’s API.
Opti takes in millions of data points each day to keep portfolios on track, without users lifting a finger.
There’s no better time to spot a gap in the market than when you’re an unhappy customer, even more so if you’re an unhappy customer with a technology fetish. After successfully building and selling a video editing company to Blackberry, Opti founder Jonas Hombert found himself in need of some investment advice. But what he received left him feeling dissatisfied. The longer he spent as an investment customer, the more he felt the advice was shaped by whatever drove most revenue for the investment firm - and this had to change.
Opportunity for all
So Opti was born, a company that has its feet firmly in the technology camp, while revolutionising access to investment advice. It ensures people get exactly the same service whether they are investing a thousand kronor or a billion. It’s independent, so the investment choice isn’t skewed towards any particular stock or fund. And being technology driven, it offers a level of portfolio diversification unrivalled in the Swedish market, important for getting good returns relative to risk, and weathering market downturns. Added to all of this is a seamless user experience that puts all of the hard work in Opti’s camp, with zero hassle for its users.
Opti works by asking simple questions about a user’s economy, such as how much they earn, and if they are married or have kids, as well as exploring the user’s appetite for investment risk. The flow differs depending on their situation. “It’s not about giving the rich better tools,” said Jonas Hombert, “it’s more about people having different needs for onboarding. Everyone gets the same investment opportunities at the end of it: we have a bus driver from a small Swedish town with the exact same portfolio as some of the largest family offices in Sweden with their billions in assets under management. We just need to do a bit more work to find the right investments for someone with more complex finances.”
Slick technology
To complete the onboarding process, Opti teams up with Tink’s account aggregation technology to make connecting to a bank account seamless. Without this, the customer would have to go to their bank app and collect account numbers and data themselves, and then input all of that into Opti, which would inevitably lead to errors and drop offs.
But most importantly for Opti, by using Tink’s iOS SDK (a front-end mobile software development kit for account authentication and payment initiation) they were able to build their own interface, so that the user stays in the Opti environment, while letting the SDK handle the complexities of connecting to banks through Tink’s API. “In general, every app maker wants to keep the user experience as streamlined as possible,” said Jonas, “and we found that to be a challenge with services where you are thrown into someone else’s user experience. We wanted to be able to build the UI ourselves, but utilise the tech of another partner, and that was what Tink allowed us to do. We can streamline the user experience and make connecting to a bank feel fully part of the Opti app.”
“The integration with Tink was simple, taking just a few days,” he added, “and we felt confident it would work really well.”
Data, data and more data
After invisibly generating a portfolio recommendation, with all the orders and documentation needed for compliance, the user’s investments are live - all in under five minutes from start to finish. After that, the user doesn't have to lift a finger. Opti builds the best available portfolio through a huge mathematical challenge: “We come at this from a very strict approach. The shortest time series we use for analysis is 50 years for an asset class, the longest is 230 years. I would love to see even a big bank that crunches the amount of data that we do per day, and we are only ten people,” said Jonas.
By employing more servers than staff, Opti continuously takes in millions of data points to ensure users are always invested in the optimum portfolio. This allows funds to be automatically switched to save on fees, and Opti can make sure an investment doesn’t stray outside of a customer’s risk profile. So it’s no surprise that Opti’s fee-paying customer base has increased 10-fold in the last year. This is the sort of service that has always been available to the super-wealthy, but now Opti is offering the exact same thing for everyone.
To find out how you can build the financial services of the future with Tink, check out our guide to getting started.
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