Finovate newcomer Capital Preferences and alum WealthForge won second and third place respectively at the UBS Future of Finance Challenge Finals last week. Aesthetic Integration, which specializes in the qualitative analysis of financial algorithms, took first place.
The first-prize winner was awarded $50,000. Capital Preferences earned $20,000, and WealthForge won $10,000. Along with the other 60 regional finalists, all three companies will have access to UBS’s expert mentors and partners, and three months of intensive support and acceleration to get innovations market ready. The competition featured more than 600 applicants.
On making the finals last month, WealthForge Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Mat Dellorso focused on how his company could help firms like UBS add “significant scalability to (its) network of financial advisers and investment banking professionals.” WealthForge earned its spot in the finals with its Invest Now button, demonstrated earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2015.
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, WealthForge recently added Bill Robbins as chief revenue officer. A financial services veteran with more than 20 years of experience in building brokerage platforms, and a former president of BB&T Securities Services, Robbins will lead WealthForge’s sales, marketing and platform development.
Incorporated in 2014, Capital Preferences uses game theory, econometrics, and experimental economics to provide a unique client-risk profiling system for financial institutions. Calling client profiling “a major area of weakness for most advice firms,” Capital Preferences co-founder and CEO Bernard Del Rey credited UBS for recognizing his company’s technology and giving it a spot in the finals. He says the demand “for our technology and patent-pending methods” is from all sides of the industry and includes “bespoke private banks, regulators, and large-scale consumer-credit players in the U.S. and Australia.”
Capital Preferences makes its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2016 in London. To find out more about our upcoming February fintech conference, visit our FinovateEurope 2016 page.