8OCTOBER 2025OPINIONIN MYThe future of wealth management is looking bright. Technology is playing an increasingly important role in the way wealth is managed, with automated systems and data analytics being used to make more informed decisions. Additionally, artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming more commonplace, allowing for better risk management and more efficient portfolio management. However, there is a limit to how much artificial intelligence and optimized analytics can accomplish from a client's perspective. The rise of digital banking and the increasing demand for digital assets will continue to shape the future of wealth management in the coming years.In response, Financial institutions have been experimenting with leveraging digital assets to create new products and services, such as digital asset-backed loans and investments. Recently we have seen the launch of tokenized bonds as an alternative form of investment. These products offer investors a new way to diversify their portfolios and gain exposure to the digital asset market. As the demand for digital assets increases and the experiments turn to pilots with the intention to go to scale, the need to integrate them into the financial services ecosystem is becoming increasingly apparent. Financial services organisations will be unable to capitalize on the full value proposition. The benefits will be limited to efficiency gains from digitizing discreet components of the process within the bank's own systems vs being able to tap into new revenue streams such as secondary liquidity markets. Ultimately limiting their ability to support their client's objectives and deliver agility into their investment portfolio. Innovation will become stifled if it cannot bridge from traditional products to modern financial products. The challenges in moving from experimentation are known. The major headwinds are technology and Regulatory & Compliance in nature:The ability to scale to high volumes of transactions is both a technology constraint of the inherent blockchain protocol and an operational challenge as banks are building new modern products on new evolving technology and integrating with traditional operational solutions. Regulatory & Compliance ­ As the new asset classes emerge, the regulatory and tax environment is constantly evolving, making keeping up with the requirements a continual challenge to even the most agile of banks. To put it simply, there is no bridge from traditional compliance to new market models and product compliance. Within those two categories, there are sub-sets:Corporate Culture ­ or shall we just use the single word "risk."Investment case ­ Especially given the competing priorities of digital client-facing solutions and modernization of core banking technology. Security and Privacy - in the context of peer-to-peer transactions, grappling with the exposure of client data is a huge deterrent. Employee understanding ­ Enablement of key banking personnel who have to champion these new products. Legacy Technology debt ­ Digital assets sit on modern tech, and modern tech needs to integrate with legacy technology. Depending on how mature the banks' journey to the cloud is, the size of the challenge will vary. WEALTH MANAGEMENT AND DIGITAL ASSETS, MOVING FROM EXPERIMENTATION TO FULL-SCALE ADOPTIONBy Ann-Marie O'Malley, Executive Director, Platform Strategy Initiative Lead, Group Operations & Technology Office, UBS
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