\n Ashish Sharma, Country Director, Malaysia, at Backbase, took to the stage during the “In the Hubbis Hot Seat” session at the Hubbis Malaysia Wealth Management Forum to address what he described as the critical challenge holding back wealth management growth across Southeast Asia: fragmented technology systems that prevent relationship managers (RMs) from delivering the personalised advisory experience their clients expect.
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\nWith 18 years of experience in banking technology across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and India, and nine years based in Malaysia, Sharma framed his pitch around a proposition that resonated with the day’s broader themes: that artificial intelligence (AI) can only augment the human adviser when it operates on top of a unified, connected operating environment.\n <\/p>\n
A Challenge Heard Throughout the Day<\/p>\n
Sharma opened by acknowledging that his presentation had been shaped in real time by the conversations he had been having with delegates and the sessions he had been listening to since the morning. “I’ve been taking notes since morning on all the sessions and talking to some of you also, and it is resonating quite openly with the challenges which the wealth management companies and the banks are facing to target their clients,” he said.<\/p>\n
He identified three recurring problems. The first is that banks across Malaysia and the wider region want to empower their RMs to provide customised financial advisory to clients, but that disparate, fragmented systems make this difficult in practice. RMs spend too much time conducting research and preparing for client meetings, time that should be spent on the advisory conversation itself. When data is spread across multiple disconnected platforms, assembling a complete picture of a client’s position, preferences and needs becomes a manual, time-consuming exercise.<\/p>\n
The second challenge is intergenerational wealth. Sharma noted that RMs increasingly need to engage with clients across different generations, each with distinct expectations around communication, service delivery and digital experience.<\/p>\n
The generational gap in client expectations is well documented across the industry \u2013 but the operational challenge it creates for RMs is less often discussed. Serving a 65-year-old founder and their 35-year-old heir from the same book, with the same team, through systems that weren’t designed for either, is where fragmentation becomes most costly. Managing both at scale requires more than good intentions from the adviser.<\/p>\n
The third challenge is the pressure to scale. “The board and everybody wants to scale up the business even faster,” Sharma said. Yet scaling a wealth management business without addressing the underlying technology fragmentation simply amplifies existing inefficiencies, spreading the same problems across a larger client base and a bigger team of advisers.<\/p>\n
A Unified Wealth Operating System<\/p>\n
Sharma then introduced Backbase’s solution to these challenges. The product \u2013 Backbase’s AI-native Banking OS \u2013 is built to address fragmentation at the infrastructure level, not the application layer. Rather than adding another point solution to an already crowded stack, it sits above existing systems and coordinates work across them, bringing client data, RM productivity tools, and back-office functions into a single shared environment.<\/p>\n
He outlined the layers of technology that the Banking OS connects. On the front end, it connects the customer channels through which clients interact with their RMs. In the middle, it encompasses the productivity tools and systems that RMs themselves use in their daily work. And at the back end, it links into core wealth systems, mutual fund engines, treasury platforms, reporting systems and governance tools. The result, Sharma argued, is a single operating environment in which the entire context of the client relationship is available to everyone who needs it.<\/p>\n
“This context is very important for RMs, for your product managers who are also part of this system, and also your operations team who also use this system,” Sharma said. “Everybody has the same shared context.”<\/p>\n
The emphasis on shared context is significant. In many wealth management organisations, different teams operate with different views of the same client, depending on which systems they have access to and how recently those systems have been updated. The problem, as Sharma framed it, isn’t just that systems don’t talk to each other. It’s that the actual work of wealth management \u2013 client research, meeting preparation, compliance checks, portfolio context \u2013 happens in the gaps between those systems, invisible to any single system and carried out manually by the people who can least afford to spend time on it. The Banking OS addresses this structurally, replacing the manual coordination with a shared operational layer every team reads from and writes to.<\/p>\n
AI That Augments, Not Replaces<\/p>\n
With the Banking OS architecture established, Sharma turned to the role of AI within it. He was careful to frame the technology not as a replacement for human advisers but as a tool that makes them more effective. “It’s not about definitely replacing the RM,” he said. “It is about how AI can help and empower the RMs more and more to be able to handle different customer expectations, different generations of customers, and also different segments.”<\/p>\n
He explained that once the Banking OS has established a unified data foundation, RMs can deploy AI agents to handle the preparation work that currently consumes their time. In practice, this means an RM walking into a client meeting with the agent having already surfaced the client’s portfolio concentration risks, flagged a product that matches their current eligibility and risk profile, and prepared a conversation prompt based on recent market movements. The RM brings the judgement and the relationship. The agent brings the groundwork.<\/p>\n
These agents can surface real-time insights from across the Banking OS’s connected systems, giving RMs access to up-to-date information about a client’s portfolio, transaction history, risk profile and product eligibility at the point of interaction rather than requiring them to compile that information manually before a meeting.<\/p>\n
Sharma also connected this capability to a theme raised by earlier speakers at the forum: the growing client expectation for real-time advisory. In volatile markets, clients increasingly want immediate, informed responses from their advisers rather than waiting for a scheduled review. AI-driven insights, delivered through a unified platform, enable RMs to meet this expectation without requiring them to monitor every data point across every system in real time. The Banking OS handles the aggregation and analysis; the RM applies judgement and delivers the advice.<\/p>\n
Serving Multiple Segments From One Operating System<\/p>\n
Sharma extended his argument to the question of client segmentation. He noted that wealth management firms in Malaysia typically serve clients across a range of segments, from mass affluent to affluent to high-net-worth (HNW) individuals, each with different service expectations, product requirements and regulatory considerations. Managing these segments through separate systems or workflows creates duplication and limits the firm’s ability to move clients between segments as their wealth grows.<\/p>\n
The Banking OS, Sharma argued, allows firms to serve multiple segments from a single environment, tailoring the experience to each segment’s needs without maintaining entirely separate technology stacks. The AI layer amplifies this capability by enabling personalisation at scale: rather than requiring RMs to manually adjust their approach for each client, the system surfaces segment-appropriate insights, product recommendations and communication prompts automatically.<\/p>\n
Sharma did acknowledge the limits of this approach. He noted that family office banking, in particular, involves a level of complexity that may not be fully addressed by a single platform. “Family banking is something extremely complex, which I also learned today,” he said. But for the affluent, mass affluent and HNW segments, he argued, the combination of a unified Banking OS and AI-driven personalisation can meet the majority of client expectations without the fragmentation and manual effort that characterise current operations.<\/p>\n
The Malaysian Context<\/p>\n
While Sharma’s message was applicable across the region, he grounded it specifically in the Malaysian market. He noted that many banks in Malaysia have identified wealth management as a strategic priority, but that only a few have been able to execute on that ambition successfully. The gap between aspiration and delivery, he suggested, is largely a technology problem.<\/p>\n
Malaysian wealth managers face the same fragmentation challenges as their peers elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but with additional complexity arising from the country’s regulatory environment and the cross-border nature of many client relationships. An operating system that connects disparate systems and provides a shared context across functions is not merely a productivity tool in this environment; it is a prerequisite for the kind of scalable, compliant growth that the industry is seeking.<\/p>\n
Sharma’s nine years in Malaysia lent credibility to his observations. His familiarity with the local banking landscape was evident in the specificity of his remarks, and his acknowledgement that he had been learning from the day’s other sessions suggested an approach grounded in listening to the market’s needs rather than simply promoting a product.<\/p>\n
Technology in Service of Advice<\/p>\n
Sharma closed with a point that had run through the entire session: the advisory relationship is still the product. Technology doesn’t change that. What it can change is how much of an RM’s day is spent on administration versus advice \u2013 and right now, in most wealth management firms, that balance is badly wrong. A unified Banking OS removes the friction. AI handles the groundwork. The RM does what only a human can do.<\/p>\n
“Your personalised services can be met with one unified operating system which removes the fragmentation and provides the shared context to all the parties, utilising AI to empower your RMs,” Sharma said. He invited delegates to continue the conversation over lunch, signalling that the firm is actively engaging with the Malaysian market and seeking to understand the specific challenges that local wealth managers face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ashish Sharma, Country Director, Malaysia, at Backbase, took to the stage during the “In the Hubbis Hot Seat”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[173438,173442,173450,173446,173437,173441,173449,173445,173439,173443,173451,173447,173436,173440,173448,173444,45,49,48,15954,133,131,132,9210],"class_list":["post-740626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-asia-private-banking","tag-asia-private-banking-news","tag-asia-private-banking-online-training","tag-asia-private-banking-training","tag-asia-wealth-management","tag-asia-wealth-management-news","tag-asia-wealth-management-online-training","tag-asia-wealth-management-training","tag-asian-private-banking","tag-asian-private-banking-news","tag-asian-private-banking-online-training","tag-asian-private-banking-training","tag-asian-wealth-management","tag-asian-wealth-management-news","tag-asian-wealth-management-online-training","tag-asian-wealth-management-training","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-e-learning","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}